Sir? Sir? It's okay, sir.

No, please don't struggle, sir. Look, your wing's right here, sir. Nothing's happened to it. Yes it is, sir. How very observant of you, sir.

That hurt, sir. That actually hurt. I'm impressed.

Please just lie down, sir. Try to calm down. We're your friends, sir. The war's been over for quite a while now, sir.

Pinkamena? Help me, please. She doesn't want to calm down.

No. No, that won't be necessary. She'll be okay in a few minutes. She'll be okay...

Sir, you remember what happened after you lost your wing, don't you? No, before you got here, sir. About a year ago, sir.

I wasn't there for all of it. I heard that Sombra threw you off the spire after he ripped your wing off. I don't think any of us ever found your wing. We found you, though. Well, they found you. I think it was one of the Wonderbolts. No, not Spitfire. I think it might have been Fleetfoot. I don't know who that is either, sir. The name just sounds familiar.

I was there when they brought you in. I watched three soldiers that everyone said didn't have time for fear or decency, carrying a greenhoof sergeant in on a stretcher. I saw the tourniquet. They made it out of your uniform. They tied it so tight, I think they made it worse. The nurses started yelling at them as soon as they landed, but I wasn't standing very close. I don't know if the tourniquet was too tight.

I noticed your mane. The rest of the war always looked like rocks. There was a lot of gold and lazurite, and the camps were very basalt, and the battlefields were chalk and arkose. But there isn't a rock with all the colors of your mane. I've never heard of any rainbow rock. I used to study rocks, you know, before the war. I've been thinking of going back and getting my rocktorate.

No, sir, it isn't silly. It's a degree. It's very prestigious.

Yes, your mane. Your mane didn't look like a rock. Didn't even remind me of any rocks. Even Celestia reminded me of a rock, but you didn't. You were different.

I hadn't been deployed that day. They were saving me for when the situation was desperate. I didn't have anything to do that day. There was a spot, in the corner of the medical tent, where I wasn't in anypony's way. I wanted to watch. It would help prepare me for the battlefield.

The surgeons knew what they were doing. They cut off the rest of the bone and cleaned up the edges of the wound pretty fast. I didn't know unicorns were so good at detailed work. It was good to know that.

Oh, I'm sure it hurt. You kept gritting your teeth and twitching your wings. Your mane got pretty matted with sweat. Your fur was pretty wet too. Like you just had a bath. I think you started crying after a while.

No, you wouldn't have remembered this. The surgeons were using a lot of sleep magic and anesthetic on you.

The Wonderbolts didn't really know how to stay out of the way. Ponies kept bumping into General Spitfire. She didn't look like she really knew what was going on. After a while, she started asking where your helmet was.

Please don't cry, sir. Pinkamena, could you get her chair standing up again? Thank you. Come on over here, sir. You'll feel better once you can sit down. There. Are you feeling better, sir? You look a bit more relaxed.

Because you're a Wonderbolt, sir. I'm just a demolitions expert. You were our squad leader. Yes, Pinkamena, I do mean past tense. The war is over, after all.

Yes, sir, that is your wing. Yes, sir, you did lose your wing fighting Sombra. It's still your wing, sir. Here, let me show you.

See, it just goes on right here. It still fits the groove of the stump. It was made to. Now, the straps go here, over here, now through underneath there, and then... Yes, that's right. See, you do remember.

Oh, these ones? The hoof controls. They go right down your leg, just like this, and then you just move your hoof to move the wing. Yes, just like that. Very good, sir.

Is it? I never really looked at it that way. Oh, I didn't know it caught the light like that. Is it heavy, sir? Oh. Good. I would hate to find that out now, sir.

Because I made it for you, sir.

Well, I didn't make the whole thing. I'm not a blacksmith. I'm a rockologist. Well, I could be. Please don't laugh at me, sir. It's my dream. Yes, that as well, sir.

The doctors all agreed you would survive. Spitfire was very happy to hear that. She has a very shiny smile. Like diamonds, but not very much. But the doctors also said you'd never be able to fly again. They said they couldn't make a replacement wing. It would take too long, and they didn't have any golem specialists on staff.

I started thinking when I heard that. I wondered what you would think if you woke up and got told you couldn't fly. You were a Wonderbolt, after all. Being able to fly with them was probably a big part of why you joined the war. And you were a pegasus, too. I didn't know much about pegasi, but I thought that flying would probably be pretty important to a pegasus. Pegasi usually get cutie marks that have something to do with flying, too, and I didn't know what kind of cutie mark a one-winged pony might get. I started thinking that there must be a way for you to fly.

I went for a very long walk. I strayed out of camp, but it wasn't a big deal because I strayed south. We thought the south was safe back then, after all. Pinkamena, are you okay? Please don't cry. Here, do you want a hug? Come on, you need a hug. There we are.

But I went for a walk, and I was concentrating on the ground. I always do that when I need to really think about something. I felt a lot of rocks down there. I usually do. But I felt something I didn't normally feel. It was a rich deposit of iron ore, less than twenty feet below the surface. That was when I thought of a way that I could help you to fly again.

I dug down into the earth as fast as I could. I scraped out a pretty big lump of ore, but I didn't know if it would be enough. I decided I could always come back and get more, so I climbed out of the hole and took the ore back into camp. I was very lucky to find a forge, where nopony would give me weird looks for punching a rock over and over.

It took longer than usual to beat the ore into the shape I wanted. Iron is a very selfish rock, you know. Very self-important and full of itself. It didn't want to budge until I told it what it was going to be used for.

I told it I wanted to help a pegasus fly. Since it was a rock, it didn't know what a pegasus was. I told it that pegasi were like earth ponies, except they could fly through the air on very pretty wings. The ore asked me why it had never met a pegasus before. I told it that pegasi could not hear or talk to the earth like earth ponies can. The ore got very huffy, and asked why it should help a pony who would never thank it for its services. At first, I didn't know what to say.

I thought about the war, but ore doesn't care about ponies. It only cares about itself, and the earth it lives in. For a few minutes, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to help you. Then I thought of a way to convince the ore to help me.

I asked if it knew about dark crystals. It answered that it could hear the screams of the earth from where it lived. Then I told it how every pony in Equestria was doing everything they could to stop the crystals from advancing, to beat them back and save the earth. I told it how the pegasi were our best soldiers, how they were doing even more work than the earth ponies, even though they could just hide in the clouds. I told it how the pegasus that it could help to fly again needed its help because she had tried to do more than anypony could do on their own.

The ore was convinced. It promised that it would do everything it could to help you fly again, and told me to be quick about it. I asked the blacksmiths if an iron wing could fly. I expected them to laugh, but they didn't. Instead, they pulled out a blueprint for a mechanical wing they had been working on, and explained that steel would probably work better than iron. I asked if they had a blast furnace. They smiled and asked what kind of engineers they would be if they didn't.

I told them they would be very inconvenient without a blast furnace. They laughed, but I don't think they were mocking me. We got to work right away.

I really wanted that wing to be made as fast as possible. The blacksmiths told me that it would take time for the steel to cool, and that I should get some rest. But I didn't need to rest. I did take a break, though, and walked around the camp a little. I went into the medical tent, and tried to relax by watching you sleep. Your wing was fluttering an awful lot, and I wanted to tell you that everything was going to be alright and that I was going to help you fly again. But the nurses said you shouldn't be disturbed. I didn't know much about medicine, so I listened to them and went back to the forge.

The steel wasn't cool, but I didn't want to wait any longer. I needed to work, needed to bring us closer to making you fly. The mold for the wing was already made, we were just waiting until we had workable metal. I decided that we had workable metal already, and got to work hammering out the finer details in the steel.

The blacksmiths tried to stop me because they thought I would burn my hooves. I expected to burn my hooves. But the steel told me it did not want me to burn. It told me that in this form, it at last knew movement, and it was afraid of not being able to move. I told it that the wing would have joints, and the steel told me it knew what it was like to be crippled now. It never wanted to be inert again. It didn't want you to be inert. So it let me work, and did not burn my hooves.

The steel cooled after about an hour of work, and the finer details started to stick. We started to form the mechanism. Well, I did. The blacksmiths were mostly content to just give me instructions and corrections. They tinkered with the feathers once or twice, but the core mechanics and mechanisms were left to me.

It wasn't until the sun rose that I felt we had something worth calling a wing. It wasn't until noon that we had what the blacksmiths were willing to uphold as a prototype. It wasn't until the next sunrise that we had something we were willing to present to you.

It was the first time I saw you awake. You looked so sad. I wanted to show the wing to you, but I decided to let the blacksmiths handle the presentation. They had a way with words. I have a way with rocks, and metal. That, and I didn't want you to hate me if it all went wrong.

You seemed to be really happy, once they explained it all to you. You had a very big smile when they showed you how it opened and closed and moved. You looked so sad when we found out you were too weak to stand and test it out.

You stayed up as long as the doctors would let you, just talking to the blacksmiths. You asked so many questions we hadn't thought about, told us so many things we hadn't known, it was all I could do not to punch myself in the face every time you opened your mouth. I wanted to take the wing away from you and fix it, but I knew that if I took it away then, I wouldn't hear anything else you had to say. And even though you kept poking all these holes in our design, you kept smiling, and you kept holding that wing. I didn't want to take the wing away in case you stopped smiling.

That night, when you finally fell asleep, I took the wing away as fast as I could. The blacksmiths had turned in for the night, and taken their lists with them. But I didn't need their lists; I had listened to every criticism, every new idea, every brilliant suggestion.

Yes, brilliant. I never would have thought about that extra point of articulation on the basal phalanx. You're brilliant, sir.

But even after everything was done, we still had to wait for three days until you were strong enough to actually try it. I tried to fill the time with a hundred little corrections and improvements, but there was only so much I could do without talking to you. All I could do was listen to you and the blacksmiths talking about the wing, and be happy that you were happy, even with all of the setbacks.

I fell asleep in that corner of the medical tent. I hadn't meant to, but it turns out that you can't stay awake forever. I dreamed about being a rock, and being at the mercy of the dark crystals. I dreamed about you smashing all the crystals into pieces. I dreamed about you having wings made of steel that cheered your name.

I woke up because I realized I didn't even know your name yet. It had never come up. If it had, I hadn't been paying attention. You were just the pegasus with the missing wing. The pegasus with the rainbow mane. The Iron Wing. Commander. Sir. I didn't learn your name until later that day, after we got the call to...

Okay, I guess we're hugging now. This is nice.