"…it never was and never will be,
You don't know how you've betrayed me.
And somehow you've got everybody fooled…"
Everybody's Fool, Evanescence
"Why did you tell them?"
Jeb tensed. "Iggy…"
"Stop." Iggy held up a single index finger, but that one gesture seemed to convey a weight heavier than the entire world – the strain only made starker by the grey pallor of his face. He looked tired, drawn, swaying slightly as he stood, like a sapling being forcefully tossed about by some hidden, inner gale. When he spoke next, his words were harsher than ice-ridden winds, funeral bells tolling defeat. "Just tell me why you did it."
Jeb breathed out a shaking, shuttered breath, staring down at his hands, the blue veins that ridged the skin, as he clenched and unclenched his fists. "I did it for you."
Iggy kicked a chair. It swayed, then slowly descended, crashing to floor with a bang that shook the room. For a brief moment, the whispers – hissing, coalescing shadows on the other side of the door – seemed to pause, then restarted, urgency tinging the voices like gathering storm clouds.
Jeb got up, closed the door, and quietly righted the chair, his back bowed under the weight of… guilt? Relief? Defiance? Which one was more accurate? He could feel Iggy's blue eyes glaring at the side of his head, the force of his gaze chiselling twin holes; he could feel them, two throbbing sores under the skin…
Or maybe it was just a migraine.
"And why did you think revealing my secret would be better for me?" When Iggy spoke, his voice was defiant yet low, controlled, hands slowly balling into angry, tight little fists by his sides. The sight of him – all bedraggled cream wings, dark shirt and capris, and too-bright eyes – aggravated a stirring of fear and regret at the back of his mind.
Jeb answered through a lump in his throat. "Because you were getting overwhelmed."
"Overwhelmed." Iggy snorted and the sound, leaping from his nose and lips, sounded too bitter, too disbelieving. Jeb caught and worried with his bottom lip, searching for an answer as he searched the bat hybrid's face. His blue eyes – a shade paler than before, tepid waters turned to ice – looked dead, beaten, his face ashen-pale and shell-shocked. Creases were etched into the ivory skin between his eyebrows, purple shadows wreathing his eyes. He looked exhausted.
"I was worried." Jeb spoke softly, gently. "You didn't seem to be coping with it."
Iggy's left hand raked itself through his hair almost like a nervous tick – when he spoke next, his voice was higher, jumping and cracking, like a zealous explorer forcing himself over a cold brick wall. "Yeah, and I would have found a way to cope with it if you hadn't gone and blabbed!" Iggy's voice climbed, forcing itself higher and higher, tinging with hysteria. He breathed out suddenly, collapsing down into the swivel chair, the padded seat rotating and slamming his knee into the edge of the desk. He didn't seem to notice.
"What on earth," he murmured, and the hopelessness in his voice made Jeb's heart – all the clinical causticity, the School's enforced motives of science and experiments – shiver inside him. "Am I going to do now?"
"Explain to Max." Jeb helped him out of his seat, guiding him to the door by a firm grip on his elbow. When Iggy resisted, he demanded, voice cracking slightly. "Please Iggy. Just give it a chance."
Iggy looked at him – and, spurred on by the dead feeling in his eyes – Jeb marched him through the door into the kitchen, where the flock was waiting silently in the grey dawn light.
He couldn't believe this. Earlier he would have felt anger, but now he only felt hollow, sore, a throbbing headache riding the tossing waves of his mind. It only seemed to increase as Jeb lead him forward, gripping his arm, footsteps seeming abnormally loud as they pounded against the hard kitchen tiles, a rhythm to his fragmented thoughts and emotions.
Had to happen…
Thump thump thump…
Bound to… so stupid for not considering…
Thump thump…
So hollow… so scared…
Thump…
What will happen?
They stopped. Iggy studied his laces – he wanted to look up, but couldn't, couldn't in case he saw anger, in case he saw sadness…
He couldn't cope with the flock's emotions on top of his own.
Max took a breath. Iggy heard it, whistling between her teeth, instinctively stopped his ears twitching, then let them. What was the point? Jeb had already told them, it was all over…
"We've decided to ask you to prove it." Max bit out each word, all crackling voice riven with disbelief and tension, hands balling into little fists by her sides as Iggy looked up and saw her.
Gazzy whimpered. Angel stiffened. Fang arched an eyebrow. Nudge opened her mouth – Jeb stopped her with a single head shake.
The chiroptophobiac swallowed, taut fists lessening as she repeated the words, the words that dropped from her mouth and hung in the air like the heaviest of stones, the most lingering of soap bubbles.
"Prove it."
So. That was it. Iggy unfurled his wings with a crackle of tendons and bones, stretching them towards the ceiling, bone-claw lifting automatically out of the covering of feathers, ignoring Nudge's whimpers, Gazzy's steady tears, dripping down his face and flecking the white-silver tiles…
… 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…
His breathing hitched, cramped in his throat, before he shook his head, strawberry locks tangling around his face as he inched his hand slowly, painfully, up his wing…
… 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…
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry Gazzy, Nudge… I'm so sorry…
Was he really sorry? Or was he just relieved?
What was he really feeling?
Pluck, scatter, pluck, scatter… he continued the rhythm of plucking out the feathers, eyes stinging with unshed tears at the younger kid's sniffles, back hunched, and he didn't want to look up, he didn't want to look up and see Max and Fang's reactions, he didn't want…
A single gasp shattered past his throat, and he blinked rapidly, unshed tears blurring his vision.
Pluck, scatter, pluck, scatter…
He didn't want to be hurt. Not again.
…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…
The kitchen was a vortex of black-tipped cream feathers, interspaced by Jeb's furrowing frown, Max's rapid, shaky exhalations, Fang's restraint, and the younger children's tears, and he had reached the end of his wings.
His wiry, membranous bat wings.
Iggy sucked in a breath, a single tear rolling down his nose, as he tilted his head back to the ceiling. The bright fluorescent dispersed the shadows clinging to his vision and nearly blinded him. He closed his eyes, and spoke.
"The… only…" he swallowed past tears and tension, and began again, bowing his head in submission. "It's true. It's all true."
"Iggy, why!" Nudge wailed out loud, flinging herself down onto the kitchen tiles, and began to cry. The echoes of her tears rebounded across the room, ricocheting and cracking sharply off the white corners, a layered tapestry that invoked memories, made them stir…
"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 wereneversupposed to be here!"
Iggy's fists clenched, tendons ridging skin topped with white bone, as the tears streamed down his face. "She… Marian Jensen…"
'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."
"You said… Max hates bats… she's scared of them, and I…"
"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.
He screamed aloud, past Nudge's wails and Max's winces, flinging up his hands so the feathers swirled and danced. "I WAS SCARED!"
…"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…
…"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."…
"The only way…" Iggy's words sounded pathetically soft in the harshness of the room. "I could really survive…" he straightened up, meeting Max's gaze for the first time, blue meeting brown, wanting, desperately wanting to prove to her that he wasn't a monster, he wasn't… (well how could he know? A small, taunting voice inquired at the back of his mind, and he flinched and looked away). The trembling of his limbs made it difficult to finish. "The only way I could live … was by living behind a mask."
When Max spoke, it was as though the words had forced their way up the back of her throat, pungent and tickling and strenuous, all white, pale face and trembling, compressed lips. "You're disgusting."
He cracked. "That's why! That's why I had to go in disguise, because of you! You always made me feel useless, you always had to…" he caught himself before he could say any more and turned away, trembling and clenching his fists and wanting, wanting nothing more than to…
He didn't know. He didn't know what he wanted to do.
"So, is that why I couldn't read your thoughts?" Angel's blunt voice cut through the air like a knife, dodging Max's disbelieving noise.
Iggy exhaled. "Yes. Jeb taught me."
Angel made an angry noise, and pounded the knee of her jeans with one hand. "You little…!"
"Angel, enough," Fang glanced at Iggy briefly, eyes lingering on his wings, before he turned back to the flock. "This obviously is something we all need to take some getting used to…"
"No." the strength in Max's voice had returned, crackling bolts of lightning impacting on charred metal plates. Her fists clenched, angry eyes glaring out from a face drawn between lank brown hair. Her next words came out as a growl. "We are not going to get used to it."
An extraordinary clarity seemed to have come over Iggy's thoughts, telling him that yes, it was all happening, it was all true, all his nightmares were becoming reality…
And Iggy had memorized how his nightmare had ended.
Iggy turned away. "Yes. That's what I thought."
And so, tears drying on his face, he walked soddenly through the maelstrom of feathers, away from Max's bellows for him to return, tears and pain, and headed for the door to his room.
To be continued…