Author's Notes: Idea based off the oneshot "A Small Complaint" (fanfiction . net/s/7399642/1/A_Small_Complaint) by Dark Ice Dragon. Follows Odd Squad Scanlations' (oddsquad . org ) translations of the names. Manga-based. (Only because there is no mention of wings on Sun's uniform in the novel.)
Beta-read by chicaalterego. All credit for this much improved second version of chapter one, posted Jan 3, 2012, goes to her!
"Why the hell does the Sun Knight have wings on his uniform anyway?" grumbled Creus Sun as he struggled to take off his coat. Once again, the wings hooked on his extra long, silky blond hair… and this time he heard a rip.
"Damn!" he swore, pulling his hair over a shoulder and again trying to shrug off the coat. He managed to get out of the heavy white material this time, and despite his cursing, he quickly and carefully hung it up. He only paused for a second to glare at the blond strands wound in the pure white feathers before rushing to the mirror to examine his beautiful hair. He did not dare imagine something had actually happened to the gorgeous locks that had won him his position over so much better qualified candidates.
N-not that he wasn't qualified! Certainly not! Just 'lesser' qualified by the biased standards most people would've judged by… yeah.
"Praise to the God of the Light," he half-joked to himself, as he ran his fingers through his hair. It all looked in order. A few split ends, but nothing a light trim and some deep conditioning couldn't fix.
And so he turned his attention back to the cursed coat, and the reason he was taking it off in the first place. The coat itself, even for all its intricate fixings and ruffles and lace, wasn't too terribly difficult to clean. An annoyance, certainly, since the Sun Knight could never be anything short of pristine, but it was doable.
The wings though… the damn wings… the wings of 'purest white dove feathers', or so he was told. Personally, he believed they were probably from a goose, regardless of what the tailor said.
How did those cursed birds manage to stay so WHITE?
And if the birds could manage so well, why couldn't the feathers once they were off the bird? The dead bird… Come to think of it, if a white bird represented the holiness and purity of the Light God…
"Shouldn't that make this sacrilege?" wondered the Sun Knight, smirking slightly, as he carefully unhooked the wings from his coat.
Careful not to crimp any feathers, Sun crouched beside a ready bucket of water and dipped the wings, first the left and then the right, into the water. He carefully ran his hands down each length of feather, cleaning out any dirt, pulling out any of his own hairs, straightening any crooked pieces. Which, since each wing was easily around eight pounds, was much easier said than done. It was like actually caring for the stupid goose the feathers probably came from.
"And, by the God of Light, these things stink when they're wet… Why can't washing these be cursed instead of my skin-whitening masks? And it takes so damn long too… If the Sun Knight has to have wings, why can't they be simple ones like Judgment's? I'll bet all he has to do is take a rag to them once a month or so! Honestly, whoever thought the Sun Knight should have wings on his costume was an idiot."
A chill went down his spine, but he frowned and promptly forgot about it. After all, it's not like the God of Light himself put together the Sun Knight's uniform, right?
It took about an hour and a half, but Sun finally finished tending to each annoying feather and piece of down. He carefully laid the wings out to finish drying and rushed off for his nightly ritual before bed.
Sun had a rough time trying to sleep that night. He tossed, he turned, but he just couldn't get comfortable. His back hurt. His shoulders ached. His neck was stiff. He finally managed to fall asleep sprawled on his stomach… and then it was morning.
Knock, knock! As usual, whenever he was most exhausted, someone came knocking on his door.
"Leemee 'lone…" he grumbled, half-asleep.
Waking up was even harder than trying to get to sleep had been. He'd been uncomfortable before; he was in pain now. His shoulders actually burned, and his back felt like a giant had tried to pull him in two pieces… and then sat on him.
"Ow…" he whined, opening his eyes slightly, stomach actually twisting from the pain. He made as if to get up and gasped as a red-hot pain sliced across his shoulders. And it wasn't just muscle ache. He really did seem to have something huge on top of him. Still… this really wasn't nearly as bad as when the Death Knight had sliced his back practically in half (not that Roland hadn't been most apologetic about that), and nothing could compare to his teacher's hellish training, so up he got.
Knock, knock, knock!
"I'm up already!" shouted Sun, the usual irritation only heightened from feeling sick and injured.
Gritting his teeth, Sun ignored the pain and got into a sitting position. Whatever it was on his back arched upwards and rustled as if in complaint. He reached to grab whatever it was, and his hand brushed feathers. Wet feathers.
Had he gone to sleep with his coat on? Oh, crap! It would be all wrinkled and mussed! And who knew what the feathers…
And Sun's blue eyes happened to fall on the hand that had brushed the feathers. Red.
Blood red, and wet. Sticky.
His eyes drifted downwards. Before he could even comprehend that he wasn't in his coat, his eyes and mind were full of blood. His blood, undoubtedly, as it was still fresh. It had completely drenched his pajamas, his blanket, his sheets, his hair…
And his wings? He dismissed the thought for later.
Curses! Blood is SO annoying to get out! He had to rush before the blood set, or he'd never get everything clean! And like hell he was going to pull from his retirement funds for new bedding!
Why was he bleeding anyway? From where? His shoulders and back really hurt, and the wings…
The damn wings could wait!
The knocking came again, this time accompanied by what was probably Adair's voice. Honestly, he was a bit too frazzled to think much about it. "Knight-Captain Sun! Knight-Captain Sun!"
"Shut up!" shouted Sun. "I'll be ready when I'm ready! Go away!"
He quickly stripped the sheets and the bedding (thanking the God of Light that the blood had not soaked through to his mattress), pulled the bed aside, and rushed into his cellar to fill his laundry basin with water and get to scrubbing. Only once the sheets and blanket were safely soaking did he allow himself to take a breath and start stripping out of his bloody pajamas, planning to throw them in the basin as well.
The pants came easily enough, and into the basin they went, but when he tried to pull off the top he hissed in pain, unable to even shift in it. Must be whatever damn wound he got last night…
Then his mind started catching up with the rest of him.
He hadn't gotten injured last night. Last night had been routine, perfectly calm and peaceful. There was no reason he should be bleeding.
And he certainly did not have wings, attached to himself, his pajamas, or otherwise…
But when he looked over his shoulder, there definitely was something feathery, though sticky with blood, and extremely large, and attached to him, not his pajamas.
"HELL no!" cried out Sun, grabbing the mirror he used when applying his full-body whitening mask and staring in shock. "No no no no no! I don't have wings! I'm not a bird, so I don't have wings! God of Light, I don't want to be a goose!"
After all, his 'usual' wings were made of goose-feathers, so naturally these would be the same, right? Right?
Why couldn't it have been a real dove? Or a swan? Swans are pretty, right? Though the honking is atrocious…
Don't tell me I'm going to honk too? My teacher would kill me at least six times if he found out this Sun Knight actually honked!
He had to get out of this shirt! He had to see what was going on! The… the wing-things that seemed to be attached to him seemed tangled in his top, like they'd burst and torn through some of it, but were still caught.
Crap. Another night shirt would probably be about three coppers. That was nearly one hour's wage!
Do you have any idea how valuable one hour is to the Sun Knight? Why, he could have … he could have slept in!
Maybe if he was careful he could clean up the blood and stitch it back together?
Trying not to whimper at the thought of spending money, he reached for a small knife he used to cut up ingredients (also for his skin-whitening masks) and tried to reach for the largest hole his right… 'wing' was partially poking through.
Now that he was thinking about it, his wings were extremely uncomfortable like this, half poking out of his shirt and all tangled up.
No! No! Not 'my wings'! I don't have wings! NOWHERE does it say the Sun Knight actually has wings! Especially not goose wings!
Back in front of Sun's door, Adair was getting quite concerned. He was used to his Knight-Captain refusing to answer the door in the mornings. He was used to being told to shut up and go away and occasionally more colorful insults from his half-asleep captain.
He was NOT used to being completely ignored. And he was NOT used to that note of pain and panic in his captain's voice.
There was only one thing to do.
He banged on the door harder and shouted louder, not caring at all that he was undoubtedly disturbing the knight-captains on either side of Knight-Captain Sun's dorm.
Thus it probably should have been no surprise when Knight-Captain Judge appeared from his door next to Sun's and glared down at the Vice-Captain of the Sun Knight Platoon. Adair stubbornly ignored him and banged on the door again, calling out and getting more and more worried at the lack of response.
Judgment Knight frowned, shoved Adair aside, and strode in. It was not like Sun to keep Adair waiting this long. Undoubtedly his best friend got himself mixed up in something stupid again. Probably a curse of some sort.
"Sun?" called out Judgment's voice from above, in his room. "Adair has been calling you for nearly twenty minutes! Sun?"
"YEAGH!" cried out Sun in panic. "DON'T COME IN!" He rushed to the side and grabbed a towel, quickly wrapping it around his bottom half.
"Alright, I won't come in," said Judgment's voice from the entrance of the cellar. "In turn you tell me why Adair's in such a panic."
"I have to clean! The blood! And… and my clothes! And the wings, oh damn, the wings!"
There was a long silence from Judgment as he tried to make sense of Sun's babble. For once, he really wasn't coming up with anything. Though at the word 'blood', his eyes dropped to the ground, immediately locking on the drips of blood leading from Sun's naked bed to the cellar.
"May I come in, Sun?" he asked, allowing his concern to show in his voice.
"No!"
"Are you sure? If you are injured and it will interfere with your duties, I need to know about it."
"…"
"Well?"
"Do you remember that you owe me three favors for not believing me that one time?"
"Yes."
"I want to redeem one."
Judgment let out a long sigh. "What did you do this time?"
"Nothing! Er… nothing I remember, anyway… How about you just come down?"
"Alright," he said, and made his way down the stairs into the cellar. It did not take long to figure out what Sun's problem was.
Judgment's eyes stared at the blood-covered Sun, to the wings tangled in his pajama top, and finally to the basin filled with bloody laundry. He gazed heavenward for a few seconds, then finally spoke.
"Are you alright?"
For some reason that comment really ticked Sun off.
"I sprouted wings overnight!" shouted Sun. "How do you think I am?" He angrily turned his back on his friend and grabbed the knife to again attempt to free himself from the nightshirt.
"I noticed," commented the Judgment Knight, sighing. "But I thought I'd ask considering the vast amounts of blood. Do you need any help with that?"
"No!" Though Sun's awkward struggling told a different tale.
"Hmm." Without further comment, Judgment grabbed Sun's hand holding the knife and twisted it from his grip. Before Sun could even protest, with two quick slashes the wings were free. They practically burst from the ruined fabric, stretching out to their rather impressive full length.
Without realizing it, Sun stretched and rolled his shoulders, reveling in the sudden freeness and ease. All the discomfort seemed to evaporate in that one moment. He flapped the wings a few times, though they were still stiff, then his eyes caught Judgment's accusing, now that they were no longer worried, ones.
"Don't look at me like that, Leithe. You know I wouldn't do anything this stupid! At least not to myself!"
Judgment continued to stare at him.
"Not on purpose…" grumbled Sun, letting his voice drift off. "And I really don't know how this happened. I just remember - "
Judgment shook his head and held up a hand to halt the beginning of Sun's rant.
"Shower first, Creus," he ordered. "Its frankly far more disgusting than any skin-whitening mask. That, and I think you're still bleeding. "
"Still blee – agh!" yelped Sun, looking down and seeing the fresh splatters of blood on the floor around his feet.
He looked over his shoulder to glare at the now arched and stretched out wing, which was indeed rather disgusting. Yuck. Yeah, he probably should get a shower first.
Wait! He couldn't just leave the blood to set into the floor! What would anyone who came into his room think if the floor was stained with blood?
"I'll wipe the floor," sighed Judgment, rolling his eyes. "Get in that shower right now. I'll look at the wings when you get out. And I'll start a fire in the fireplace in your room to help dry your wings when you finish."
Sun's eyes sparkled, the unspoken "So efficient!" practically hovering on top of his head.
But first, he reached down to retrieve the sorry scraps of fabric that had once been his nightshirt and tossed them in the laundry basin. Maybe he would be able to fix it up later… or at least only need to buy one copper's worth of fabric to repair it instead of the three needed for a new shirt.
Half an hour later, Sun exited his shower, wrapped a towel around his hips, and called up to Judgment. In a few seconds the Judgment Knight reappeared coming down the stairs to the cellar. Rather elegantly, he dropped the rag he'd used to wipe Sun's floor into the basin and came over to appraise Sun's wings.
"Is it still bleeding?" Sun asked Judgment, holding his hair aside and plopping on a stool without being told. He held his at-times-like-this annoyingly long hair out of the way so Judge could get a good look at 'the problem'.
Judgment stepped around his friend and carefully examined where the wings joined with Sun's upper back.
"A little," he said, the frown clear even in his voice. He leaned over and ran his hands around the large base of the wing. As if in complaint, the wings fidgeted.
"Damn," moaned Sun weakly, with no trace of his usual spark.
Judgment cast a low-level healing spell on Sun's wings, just enough to stop the bleeding, and carefully wiped up the fresh blood. Then he carefully returned to re-examining how the wings joined to Sun's back in a freakishly natural way. All the bones in Sun's torso seemed to have changed somewhat in order to accommodate the huge weight and structure of the wings. It appeared far too balanced to be a spell gone wrong.
"I couldn't see where they attached very well in the mirror. Think we can cut them off or something? Besides being stupidly huge, they're really heavy."
Judgment pinched the base of what looked like a blood feather. Sun yelped and nearly leaped off the stool. Only Judgment's finely tuned reflexes allowed him to dodge the enormous (and still sopping wet) wings the swung out in protest.
"You felt that," he said unnecessarily. "Making the idea of amputation foolish. This is no illusion, Creus. I think your body has actually changed to accommodate your wings."
Sun folded his arms over his chest and glared to the side at the full-length mirror, which now seemed to be mocking him with its view of those enormous wings.
Which looked quite pathetic and ugly at the moment. Drowned rats apparently had nothing on drowned birds. The white feathers were all clumpy and sticking out in strange directions, and ugly grayish skin showed beneath the feathers of the overall rather knobby bone structure.
At least they didn't smell funny anymore. They'd smelled even worse than the wings on his coat did when they were wet, and he'd been forced to use shampoo on them to get rid of the odor.
It had taken the whole bottle of shampoo to clean his wings and his hair… Oh, God of Light, multiply that by seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, seventeen years until retirement at age forty, and another hopefully fifty years or so until a peaceful death at around ninety years…
How could he possibly afford that much shampoo?
Sun visibly paled.
Maybe there was a way to make his own? Yes, he'd be sure to check with Cloud if there were any books in the library on soap and shampoo making… If he could make wine, soap should be a cinch!
"Sun. Sun! Creus!" finally growled Judge, in his rare and terrifying deep 'angry' voice, snapping Sun away from thoughts of homemade shampoo. "What happened last night? You were fine yesterday."
"Let's see… it's been another two weeks, so I had to clean those annoying little wings on the back of my coat. I complained a little about the stupid things and what a pain they were to take care of. Hah! Waking up with these, you'd think the God of Light got…" His voice trailed off and he slowly turned his head to stare at Judgment with wide eyes.
"You don't think… he actually heard me?"
Judgment's own eyes had also gone wide in surprise, before quickly returning to his usual staid expression. "Surely not!"
"They're white!" exclaimed Sun, scrambling to his feet and over to the mirror, now examining the wings in greater detail. "They're WHITE! And they're in the exact same damn place where the wings on my coat are placed!"
"Calm down, Creus."
"Oh, my God of Light! I'm a goose! A goose! Who has to spend a fortune on shampoo!"
Leithe actually grabbed Sun's face and glared at him eye-to-eye, enunciating carefully.
"If you calm down, I'll ask Ice to make you blueberry pie this afternoon. Agreed?"
Sun actually gave a bit of a nervous smile. It even amused himself that his best friend thought he could get Sun to stop hyperventilating by mentioning blueberry pie. Nevertheless, he closed his eyes and forced his breathing to slow.
"What do they look like if you use your elemental perception?"
Sun took a deep shaky breath and his eyes seemed to glaze over as he concentrated. Suddenly his eyes returned to normal and his legs started to give out. Judgment rushed over to catch him and slowly lower him to a sitting position on the ground.
"Perhaps some mischievous mage has…?" began the Judgment Knight, a fierce tone working its way into his voice. The thought that someone would dare try something like this on the Church of Light's Sun Knight! On Leithe Judge's best friend!
Sun was already shaking his head, almost crying. "They're filled with holy light, Leithe. On par with the Holy Sun Blade. This couldn't have been the work of a human."
Judgment sighed and looked heavenward. "God of Light, have mercy on this fool."
Sun actually started laughing, borderline hysterical. "N-not your lines!" he managed to choke out between laughs. To think Judge would ever say such a thing, and on behalf of the Sun Knight!
"Perhaps…" mused Judgment. "There is no reason to believe this is irreversible."
Sun forced himself to calm down. He got a towel and started debating how exactly to dry off his enormous wings.
Judgment took the towel from him and pulled him back to the stool. "Perhaps that necromancer friend of yours might know something. And we will have to inform the Pope and the rest of the Knight Captains, at the least. Probably Adair too. He's probably still waiting outside your door – absolutely refused to listen when I asked him to leave."
"Wait! What?" exclaimed Sun, turning his head to stare pleadingly up into Judgment's eyes. The Judgment Knight ignored him.
"You can't possibly expect to keep this a secret, brushing it off as an adjustment to your wardrobe?"
Sun's eyes glanced sideways guiltily. "Well… I was planning on asking Pink if she'd ever heard of anything like this…"
"The Pope and the Knight Captains," repeated Judgment firmly. "And certainly Adair and a few others will have to be aware of the matter if this continues for any length of time. Your teacher might…"
"NO!" cried out Sun in absolute terror.
Judgment didn't respond, but Sun could feel the aura of his disapproval at Sun's outburst.
"Give me just today to talk to Pink!" begged Sun, knowing he was being willful – but also knowing Judge usually gave in to his willful requests.
"And how are you supposed to get to the necromancer's house?" asked Judgment casually, tossing the wet towel aside and running his fingers through the wings.
Sun's back stiffened and he fidgeted at the strange feeling. "I'll walk of course! And don't do that!"
"The feathers need to be straightened out. And you can't possibly hide these under a cloak."
"Why? And… Oh, crap, you're right. And I'd have to modify my coat to pretend I'm trying out a change to my uniform…"
"You do remember 'everyone knows' that everything about the Sun Knight, including his 'fake' wings, is always perfect?"
Sun's mouth dropped open in horror. If it took him an hour and a half to clean those tiny eight-pound wings that attached to his coat… to clean every feather of… to straighten every…
"And I can't even reach back there!" Sun cried out, trying to pull a wing around and only managing to get a grip on the bottom half. "How am I supposed to…?"
"You'll figure something out," commented Judgment, a tiny smile actually tilting the corner of his mouth. Sun darted a glare at him and it disappeared – though the sparkle of amusement didn't leave his eyes. "I'll help you out until then. And, if you insist on seeing Pink first, may I suggest a - ?"
BANG BANG BANG! The unmistakable sound of the door being banged on by the Flame Knight echoed through the room above and down into the cellar.
"Sun! Captain Judgment! What the heck's taking so long? Why are you making Adair panic like this?" boomed Flame's voice, loud enough to be heard clearly even down in the cellar… and thus undoubtedly throughout a good portion of the Holy Temple.