((J. Dac says: What would a fanfiction be without superfluous wings? Really.))
Now, I will take some time to give the listener some idea of what I looked like back then—and what Gormos looked like, as well. My physique and appearance were drastically different than they are today. By Feather standards, I was fairly average height, at five-eleven. White-skinned, red-eyed, and green-haired—Christmas-colored, though at that time there was, of course, no Christmas. I didn't much care for haircuts, and my main body of hair grew beyond my ears, which was considered rebellious to Feathers, who either preferred a crewcut or only a few inches. Most annoying was an unavoidable extreme cowlick some of my forelock crested in, the cowlick that my detractors would later use to dub me "chickenhead." I was humanoid, in the fact I resembled a human male, though without the ability to grow facial or body hair (characteristic of all Feathers). I wore glasses to correct my nearsightedness, opting out of Lasik eye surgery mostly because I didn't trust anyone but me operating on my body. At almost any time I could be caught wearing mint-green scrubs, possibly with a sweater over the top if I was feeling cold. Since I worked seven days a week with rarely any vacations or sick days (and even those days my beeper went off like a rabid Buzz—I was perpetually on call), there was really little point in owning casual clothes. I owned maybe one pair of jeans. Besides, wearing scrubs was like wearing pajamas: the ultimate in comfort wear.
What most distinguished me from humans was the set of rather obnoxious white wings that grew from either shoulder blade. Because of their lack of purpose in airless space (and the fact I could never fly with them anyway—Feathers always lacked the musculature or lightweight bones to actually fly), I kept them strapped against my back with a harness that also conveniently functioned as suspenders. Such a binding of the wings, on my Feather homeland, would've had a religious connotation. Priests and other pious individuals often bound their wings to their backs to show some sort of respect for a higher power. While I had been somewhat religious back in Feather society, with my entire population dead, I was pretty sure that any Feather higher power had expired with the bulk of His followers. Being alone turned me to atheism.
Gormos loomed over me by at least a foot. Underneath a thick coat of navy fur, blazed with black, hard muscles flexed and worked with his laborious job. He was barrel-chested, wore a leather vest full of pockets and hooks for his various tools to hang from. Though he seemed somewhat of a pushover at first, getting to know him yielded a boisterous and warm-hearted individual, always ready to unleash a booming laugh and gather you in his arms and smother you inside a furry, vice-like hug. He called himself a Kougra. I never saw any others like him wandering around the space station. He never explained the origins of his species, or his home planet. That was fine with me. Neither of us needed a third party prying into our pasts.
Hoshiya—the Space Faerie—looked quite different back then as well. I remember distinctly the first time I saw her. I was on lunch break. Gormos was still on the clock, but had turned around the security camera in his part of the hangar to avoid being nailed for taking an extra break. Gormos was going on about some ship's engine that was giving him problems again and I, as usual, was tuning him out while keeping a calculated look of concern on my face. (Every so often, I'd interject with a 'mmhmm' or 'bugger' or 'doesn't that just beat all' for good measure.)
I made hieroglyphs in the anonymous mashed hot meal with my spork, and allowed my eyes to wander briefly out the window. A line of prisoners, all uniformed in blazing orange, trailed its way into the prison gates, their procession occasionally interrupted by the foolish few who tried to make a break for it. I no longer found anything novel about new arrivals (in fact I dreaded them, because each one required a full physical, which more often than not resulted in me with a dozen bruises and a bleeding lip), so turned my attention back to what I presumed were pulverized potatoes.
"Whatcha lookin' at, Franky?" asked Gormos, having noticed my wandering eyes.
"Eh. Just scenery."
"What scenery? We live inside a space station, Frank. I mean, granted, they do what they can to make some stuff look organic, but … holy!" Gormos suddenly interrupted himself, his eyes locking onto something outside the window. I didn't pay his excitement much mind; Gormos was easily over-stimulated. On the few times we've gone out on weekends (usually we're both too exhausted from the strains of the week), I had to physically remove Gormos from nearly assaulting a dancer who dared twirling glowsticks in front of Gormos. "Franky, you gotta look at this!"
"It's Frank, Gormos," I sighed heavily, keeping my eyes locked on my food. "Do we have to redo the stage where I called you Gormy and you suckerpunched me and I thought I was going to be blind?"
"Fine, then, Frank. You gotta see this, though. They're bringin' in a girl!"
This piqued my interest. I thought at first Gormos was referring to a female of his own species, and I would finally see another Kougra. I leaned towards the window on my chair to get a better look at the long line of arrivals. Scanning the line more closely, I looked for a tall, furry creature resembling Gormos but with a bigger bust. I found no such creature—but my eyes did linger on a smaller individual, more petite than all the other new-admits. This, indeed, was a female, but by no means a counterpart to Gormos. Her head was shaved as her fellow inmates, and the synthetic light beating down on her was caught on the multiple pieces of metal pierced onto her face: septum, lip, and a whole row of loops on her ears. Those glittering earrings drew my attention to her ears, specifically—and the unmistakable tapered helix of the species that slaughtered mine.
"No way," I murmured under my breath, and turned my eyes to her back, searching for wings. There. Though she possessed aerodynamic, double-wings markedly different from the typical broad butterfly style, there they were, sprouting just from the shoulder blades. Her skin was darker than any of her species I had seen (they normally wore their skins in anemic shades, frighteningly white), but the identification was indisputable. I was looking upon a Faerie, far from her cushioned homeland.
"So tell me, Frank. Is that what your species' girlies look like? Because if so, makes me wonder why you left," came Gormos' voice, clearly emerging from around a mouthful of food. I craned my head towards him. Unsurprisingly, he had picked up my meal from where I left off, licking the plate clean with his sponge-like tongue. I reached forward and snatched the flimsy Styrofoam tray from him.
"No. Feathers are … were … all male." I inspected the tray for any remnants of food (none), and then tossed it irritably in a nearby garbage can. I stood up jauntily, a mixture of curiosity and anger locking up my limbs. "Now if you'll excuse me, I actually work when I'm on the clock."
As soon as I strode out of Gormos' sight, I broke into a sprint. It was incredible to me that a Faerie should be so far from Faerieland. Though they had always been in closer proximity to space, their society never expressed interest in exploring the stars—only using them as flimsy predictors for the future. This surprise mingled with an ancient anger numbed and buried under years of lonely existence in the space station. Logically, I knew she alone wasn't responsible for the death of my species. She may have been one of the many ignorant that barely noticed the decimation of the Feathers below. Even this, though, seemed a dire insult, and justly punishable. She also shared the likeness of the creatures who created and unleashed an unforgivable plague, and knowing so little about her, there was also the possibility that she, indeed, was involved in the disease's conception. At the very least, I had to see her again, closer, to confirm she wasn't just a mirage, but indeed flesh-and-blood marching into incarceration.
I didn't need to sneak any peeks at the entering prisoners, nor secretly rifle through their files later to spy her from her cell. Common admission procedure required the prisoners to go through a line of tests and inspections to ensure that they weren't carrying any weapons or drugs, or any lethal disease. The penitentiary guaranteed this by having each prisoner take a turn down a gauntlet of inspections, from a full body search by much brawnier individuals, to a full health inspection by me. (Initially, the prison hadn't provided me with guards to restrain the prisoners while I stuck foreign objects up undesirable places, claiming it was a "cost-cutting strategy." After one prisoner who had cleared the full body search with a concealed knife had nearly cut me to ribbons, the prison bucked up and paid for the guards.) My break's end had not accidentally coincided with the entrance of new inmates.
I fumbled with my keys to the inspection room, managed to get them into the lock through my waves of trembling anxiety, and entered a sickly blue-and-white tiled room, bustling with a convention of crooks. The criminals were immediately identifiable by the fact they were all stripped to their skivvies, being closely watched and occasionally manhandled by the navy-clad prison staff.
I took my place at the end of the long, narrow room, straddling the wooden stool that had been left out for me. I was flanked on either side by two brutish aliens of the same species (with a name I could barely pronounce), a species that was commonly hired for muscle work. Not surprising, considering their bodies were dominated by overdeveloped pectorals, triceps, and biceps, their head and legs disproportionately tiny. With those Herculean hands, I had seen one of those creatures crush one large diamond into many smaller diamonds like a nutcracker rending the shell of a walnut. Much to my delight, they also happened to be a species of few words, so I didn't have to tolerate endless gab like I did with Gormos.
"Good afternoon, boys," I said, nodding to the two guards. They gave simultaneous grunts in reply, which I knew to mean some kind of greeting. I leaned over to the black bag placed at my feet and began placing my equipment on the table behind me, just out of reach of any criminal who might try to turn a stethoscope into an agent of strangling. I snapped a fresh pair of latex gloves over my hands as the first prisoner approached, held by the forearm by an armed guard. The accompanying guard handed me a clipboard of information on his particular inmate. While the information was given to me as a brief medical history, I also liked taking the liberty of scanning what, exactly, my new patient was convicted for.
My first particular patron was in for double homicide. I gave him a good look up and down to determine whether I could take him if he somehow managed to commit the same act spontaneously on my two guards. He was a lanky Wyndarian, a sort of weasel-like species with four sets of arms and one main set of hind legs to balance their furry frame upon. Two prominent snaggleteeth protruded from his jaw, making his scrunched face appear all the more hideous. I motioned with a jerk of my fingers for him to step forward, placing the ear pieces of my stethoscope into my ears with the other hand.
"Alright, buddy, let's make this quick."
The checkup went swiftly, until it came to inspect his teeth. As I planted both my hands firmly on his jaw, he jerked back suddenly and attempted to take my hand off with one of those monster incisors. I used that opportunity to grab him by the teeth with both hands, virtually barring him from biting me as no lower jaw could scissor upwards where I held him. He gave a piercing shriek, and the guards descended upon him, grasping him roughly by the shoulders. Holding firm to those daggers attached to his skull, I pulled him forward, staring him square in the eye. I spoke.
"Look, idiot. You're not going to bloody bite me, and if you do, my two friends here will kindly remove your arms—yes, all eight of them—from their happy home in their sockets. So I think it's rather advisable for you to cooperate, unless you want to be the only prisoner who can't put up a fist fight. And I think that'd put you at quite a disadvantage, huh, sweetheart?"
The Wyndarian immediately ceased his struggle, but the guards continued to hold him as I pried open his mouth to tap at the rotting buds of his teeth. Only the front two remained in sound condition, probably because the cocky imbecile polished them every day out of sheer pride. The sucker didn't even get the benefit of anesthesia as I yanked three teeth from their beds of squalor, tossing the blackened, bleeding nubs into a silver pan. By then the Wyndarian was rightly pissed at me again, fuming and spitting crimson saliva. With the most demeaning face I could muster, I patted him on the head and sent him off to his new life in the slammer.
As the guards attempted to take him away, he suddenly lurched backwards, straining his neck to get another shot at me. The guards help him fast, but his voice escaped to where his body couldn't go, beating at my ears. Though the lisp characteristic of Wyndarians made him sound, on the surface, quite laughable, his words penetrated the cool demeanor I carried during a standard procedure.
"You ssssshould be coming with me, misssthter doctor! You're no better than any of ussssth. I know you. I know you!"
Chills danced down my nervous system, starting from the base of my skull to my toes. The certainness with which he delivered his final line lent him some eerie credibility. I would reflect upon that line repeatedly later in life, wondering if it was that moment wherein a dark door inside myself was opened, as if that sentence contained a key. There was coldness inside me that the Wyndarian had scented. Since the expiration of my fellow Feathers, my emotions seemed unable to travel the typical spectrum everyone else enjoyed. My mind denied me a true sensation of emotional closeness; even Gormos, a friend I had lived with for over half a century, remained distant inside my mind, more a pertinent chess piece than a dynamic individual. There always remained that barrier between me and others, and something in me couldn't fully acknowledge the humanity, the common agony between the exterior world and my insides. I knew apathy, the most frigid of feelings, like a real brother, and carried it around my shoulders like a cloak of protection. I vaguely discerned objective justice, able to remove myself from any situation with significant distance. The only heated emotion I knew with any proficiency was anger, and how to dole it out lavishly.
At that moment, though, I managed to shrug off the tingling sensation with alarming ease, and continued to the next patient.