AN: Long time, no see, ne? I'm not dead and there will be more "Nevermore." I haven't been doing much writing of any sort lately, but here's some sweet, very short Sato/Risa. I'm serious this time. D.N. Angel and all its characters belong to Yukiru Sugisaki. Duh. Watch out for little Toki no Byoushin spoilers.
It started out small, of course, as little more than curiosity. Too much had happened that evening to become fixated by details right off the bat. But, at the end of it, all she had left was a white feather, a torn jacket, and the shadow of a memory.
And when she paired feather and coat and memory, she found, uncertainly, wings.
That's where the obsession had started, of course. The wings fit perfectly with the twin tears in the jacket, with the feather, with the face at the edges of her memory.
She couldn't watch a bird, now, without studying its plumage, the careful arrangement of feathers stretched over light, hollow bone. Whenever she shrugged her shoulders, she imagined feathers whispering behind her. She poured over books on flight and birds and feathers and wings, copying down all the information she'd found and storing it away for something, someday. When the history teacher decided to talk about da Vinci, she grilled him about the artist's findings on flight, ignoring the murmurs from the class that Harada Risa, of all people, was taking notes and paying attention. Riku asked her if she was ill.
Of course, she was back to ignoring the teachers the next day. By the end of the day, she'd filled a dozen pages with meticulous little sketches of all shapes and sizes, with pages for feathers, for single wings, for birds and replicas of da Vinci's drafts. She had always been a reasonably competent artist before when she could put her mind to it; now, she excelled.
"What's that?" asked Riku one night, walking up behind her sister too quickly for her to cover her sketches. "Picture of Dark?"
"No!" she said, flushing and slamming the notebook shut.
And it was true. She'd gone past drawing just feathers, just wings. Now her sketches showed shoulders, showed shoulder blades where the feathers would meet skin if, by chance, by magic, by dream, a human being had wings. She sketched the transition she imagined, where the light hairs of the human back grew a little longer and broader, becoming tiny, downy feathers that merged seamlessly into the base of the wing. Her sketches always ended at the neck, but she knew, as she'd known since the beginning, the face that went with the wings, even if it was never set to paper.
She made the mistake, one day, of drawing after school. Riku had promised that her lacrosse meeting would just be a minute, but a minute had oozed into ten and her sister had pulled out her notebook, detailing the pinions of her latest sketch, trying to fix some little problem that she couldn't quite pin down.
A boy's hand took the pencil gently from her grasp and, wordlessly, erased the feather she'd just drawn in, elongating it and shading it just so, just right. The pencil-tip rested just a moment on the curve of the neck that she'd drawn, on the little curl of hair mused by one of the wings, then placed the pencil silently back in her fingers.
"Thank you," she said, a moment later and a moment too late, but she could already hear his footsteps moving away across the grass, and instead of looking up, she took a single white feather from her pocket and closed her notebook, content, for the moment, with memory.
You're going to have to forgive me for the ending… just as I finished writing, my plane started to land, and I went "Oooh, flying through clouds, yay!" and forgot how I was going to finish this thing.
Review?