Cross My Heart, Hope To Sing, Pluck The Feathers From My Wing

The coppery musk of blood hung heavy in the air like a fog, filling his nostrils with it's pungent rust-scent. Branches and leaves rustled and clicked against each other, a solemn grove of spectators ringing the crime.

Tears ran down his cheeks and hacking sobs burst from his throat as his long, slender fingers roved over the carcass of the bird, feeling every strand of bone that connected each primary feather, forming a thin veneer of the promise of flight.

He crouched, feeling the soil's dampness- wet from last night's rainfall- seeping through the knees of his jeans. His tall, lithe body was doubled over as shudders of self-loathing ran through him. The knife that had done the deed hung limp in between his long, bony fingers. He could hear the blood as it dripped from the blade, drip, drip, drip, staining the earth red with the blood of a dead hunter who, until a short while ago, had been wheeling free above the clouds.

Iggy wiped his face with his sleeve, the thin blue cotton rasping against his face, before preparing for the next cut. The knife trembled in his hand as he held it above the dead eagle before slipping from his fingers. He doubled over with a gasp as renewed tears scrolled down his face, staining the earth with a mixture of blood and water.

His trembling fingers sought his wing; a sudden burst of creaminess, but he ignored it. Slowly his fingers gently loosened the long flight feather before tugging it out, the band of black-tipped cream joining the multitude of others scattered around him on the forest floor.

He ran his fingers over the shredded membrane, tugging out each feather and scattering it. The icy wind blew their fragile tendrils across his face, like tiny fingers drying the tears. He supposed it looked pretty: a fallen angel surrounded by his own feathers.

But he wasn't an angel. He never had been. He was a demon, scalded by the force of his own guilt and the effort of keeping it secret from the others. All the jokes, the pyromania, the laughter, had been a mask, like the thin veneer of feathers that covered his wings.

His wiry, membranous bat wings.

Every day of his life, it had been the same: transfer a dead bird's feathers to his own, then replace them once they started to molder. Replace them quickly before anyone noticed the stench of rotting feathers. He covered up who he really was with a mask, both literally and metaphorically, so that no one, not even Angel, knew who he really was.

"You are an accident!" Marian Jensen screamed at his three-month-old self, voice echoing off the pristine white tiles of the creation room. "A stain, a mistake! You shouldn't be here! You were never supposed to be here!"

Iggy cringed at the memory and worked, hands methodically plucking his wings, tugging out the dead bird's feathers and transferring them to his own. Years of doing the same had drilled the pattern of the primaries and secondaries into his brain so he could do it in his sleep if need be. The stench of blood was getting stronger, clogging his nostrils and running down his wrists.

'Bats." Seven-year-old Max announced, slamming the cage door shut behind her with a clang that seemed too loud in the cramped space of the lab. She was bleeding heavily from the recent test, where she, Fang and Iggy had been forced to let vampire bats suck their blood. 'I hate bats."

In the cage two spaces along from hers, Iggy whimpered and pressed himself against the back of his cage, although he knew that in the darkness, Max couldn't see his wings. Even in tests, Max never saw his wings, for they were all blindfolded. The dark was his friend. It protected his friends from the truth.

Tears mixed with blood ran down his cheeks and hacking gasps broke through his lips as he plucked and transferred, plucked and transferred the feathers to his ragged membrane than ran red with what little blood he had left. He knew he was sitting in a pool of blood and tears, but he didn't dare echolocate and find out exactly what it looked like. He was too near the house. His echolocation was loud: the only time he dared to echolocate in front of the flock was in battle, for everyone was too preoccupied to notice.

But the world still found ways to rage at him.

It was just after a test where they had been blindfolded and put through a maze. He had echolocated his way out and had finished the test in seconds. But not all people were happy at this discovery.

"How could you have managed to get through the maze first?" Max screamed at him, voice loud and shrill in his supersensitive ears. Her anger scared him; he remembered wailing at the injustice of the world and carrying on sobbing long after Fang had managed to calm Max down.

For back then, it seemed as though everyone, even his friends, were screaming at what he truly was. It had been back then he had made a promise never to show his true self and to make it appear as though he was the same as everyone else. That way no one would find reason to scream at him anymore.

"Please," a white-faced, nine-year-old Iggy whispered to Jeb who was driving the van he was smuggling them out of the School with. Jeb glanced over at him in some surprise, clearly wondering why he wasn't asleep in the back like the rest of the flock.

Iggy continued, desperation creeping into his voice. "I'm... I'm different from the others. I don't have... I'm a..." rather than talk, he spread his wings and let them do the talking.

Jeb's eyes widened and Iggy had a feeling that if the flock wasn't asleep, he would have shouted, like all the rest of the people who had shouted at him because of what he was.

"I can't show the rest..." Iggy remembered whispering. "Max... she hates bats and..." he cringed and skipped over his ulterior motive, his darker reasons why he wanted to keep his true self hidden. "So please... hide my wings."

Jeb had carried him up to the E-shaped house, his wings bound in white linen. "His wings got a bit hurt, sweetie." he answered Max's questions as he lay the pretending-to-be unconscious Iggy down on a bed.

Iggy had waited for five hours, until the rest of the flock had long gone to bed. Five hours was a small price to pay for the mask he would soon don to hide his true self from the rest.

Iggy finished lining up the secondaries and cautiously flapped his wings to test his new feathers strength. The discarded feathers blew up around in a vortex of fluffiness, tickling his face and neck before a cold breeze snatched them away. His wings were the same color; he had been careful to chose a bird whom had wings the same color as his former feathers. His true self he could hide, but he couldn't explain it if his wings went from cream to black in a night.

Satisfied his feathers were firmly pinned in the membrane, Iggy scraped his hands through the soil, causing a shallow grave for the dead bird beside him. He felt the bird- breathless, lifeless, featherless- as he lifted it and placed it carefully inside the shallow grave and scraped dirt over it.

"Thank you for lending your feathers to a person who..." Iggy whispered, but his thoughts contradicted him. Forced to lend, you mean! And to what? A coward who is too scared to show his true self? Because of what? Fear that Max will hate you? You were seven years old when she said she hated bats! People change over time!

"Shut up!" Iggy howled, flinging up his hands and once again engulfing himself in a whirlwind of feathers. He doubled over again, feeling his hair brush the upturned dirt, renewed tears streaming down his cheeks.

"I don't know what else to do!" he whispered helplessly to the murmuring trees around him. "This is like a drug... I can't stop doing it... I'm scared... I'm scared of what will happen if I do..."

How long he crouched there, sobbing and wailing and pouring his confessions out to the trees, he did not know. All he knew was that the air had warmed considerably when he finally took off south-east towards Dr. Martinez's house. He flew near the sunrise, feeling the glorious conflagration of rosy pinks and lavender light against his skin. Feeling the sun rise almost distracted him from his deepest, darkest secret.

But only almost.