the limitations of wax as an adhesive
So I started this the HOUR I got out of X-Men Apocalypse and then I got busy and it sat mostly-finished in my documents for like a month and a half and then I finished it and now it’s sat COMPLETELY finished in my documents for about two and a half weeks. But I finally got around to posting it. Warnings for…standard X-Men-level violence, body horror, social prejudice, and general jackassery, and also for rampant abuse of parentheticals. Crossposted to AO3 here.
So this is how it starts.
He comes around and the first thing he realizes is that his head is clear, really clear, for the first time in…a while. Might be days. Might be weeks. Good fucking job, he tells himself while he’s still working up the courage to move. Stranger danger, dumbass. Especially when the strangers in question are blue and pop out of mysterious purple bubbles, apparently. To give himself due credit, he’s pretty sure he tried to leave the blue stranger in the dust—the guy’s name is elusive, something ancient, something translated roughly as ‘Apocalypse,’ and isn’t that just menacing as hell.
The second thing that hits him, close on the heels of the scraps of memory, is that fact that he’s quite possibly never felt worse in his life. Well. No. He takes that back. This is the second worst he’s felt in his life. He tries moving his head and finds that, while nothing immediately starts screaming ‘broken spine’ at him, he feels like he’s got the gods’ own hangover. He’s never had a hangover before, even when he drank himself unconscious, but between the splitting headache and nausea, he’s confident that this is what they feel like. Given the aches making themselves known all over his body and the weight resting on him, he’s also suspicious that there may—just possibly—be a building on him. Part of a building, at least. Even the wings ache, and the revelation that metal can hurt is not one he particularly wanted to have. Not the moment to panic about the wings, he tells himself strictly, trying to replicate his father’s most commanding tone. It doesn’t help with the panic to have his father in his head.
The third thing, which he realizes in the process of dragging himself out from what turns out to be a respectable portion of cement wall and the twisted remains of the bastard child of a plane and a helicopter, is that he has no idea where on Earth he is. Wherever it is, it’s a wreck—he remembers part of the fight, in smeared colors and fragments. The devil-boy was back, and he’d like to never fight a teleporter again, ever, because it hasn’t gone well for him. At first he’s concerned that Apocalypse got what he wanted, but there are people starting to rummage through the wreckage, so that seems unlikely. He catches a glimpse of himself in a piece of glass—the marks he dimly recalls are gone from his face, but he looks…monstrous. Warlike.
“Hey, excuse me,” he says, walking up to the closest person—a young woman with her hair hidden beneath a hijab—and trying to look lost.
She screams at him, in Arabic, and the memory clicks. Egypt. He’s in fucking Egypt, with no money, no allies, no idea how to speak the language, and a pair of foreign wings soldered to him. He remembers a little more, each muddled memory leading to others, and grimaces. Honestly, from what he recalls, she seems completely justified in hurling the first sizable chunk of stone she can reach at his head. He snaps the wings around himself, a tight shell, and the stone ricochets off with a bell-like note. He peers out from behind the metal arch and, oh, excellent, her screaming seems to have attracted more like-minded people. With stones.
He throws himself into the sky—every muscle and joint screams and if his head doesn’t crack right open in the brilliant desert sunlight, he’ll have to start going back to church to thank someone. For the first time in years, the wind makes tears stream from his eyes.
He flies until he’s too exhausted to make it any further, the sun setting, and comes down ungracefully near the shore of what he thinks is probably the Mediterranean. Sitting there and starting to pry off the armor piece by piece, he realizes that he’s ravenous, his body demanding food like he hasn’t eaten in days. It’s quite possible, even probable, that he hasn’t, given Apocalypse’s general disdain for basic human needs, and also completely possible that if he tries to cross the water in this condition, he’ll black out in mid-air.
Holy God, he’s going to need to make it across the Atlantic if he wants to get home. The thought crosses his mind and he almost has a panic attack on the spot, having to lie back and stare at the sky until his heartbeat retreats from his ears. It’ll be a problem for tomorrow, though, or probably the day after, and when he stops shivering he sits up again.
Getting the armor off is awful—he can’t find a single latch, everything seemingly created from raw firmament as a set of linked pieces. He’s strong enough to rip off some of the smaller parts without too much trouble, metal snapping as he tears away the greaves and gauntlets. The shoulder pauldrons and other joint pieces come away as well, but by the time he’s down to the torso armor his hands ache, fingertips bloodied from dragging at the metal edges. He’s not sure how to get the breastplate off, let alone the back-piece fitted around the base of the wings. He misses his jeans and leather coat, loose and comfortable—beneath the armor, there’s a skintight black garment of indeterminate material, and it’s not a whole lot better than the armor itself.
“I need a bolt cutter or some shit,” he mutters, pulling uselessly at the base of the breastplate and trying not to focus on the way it presses against his chest with every breath, claustrophobic as a cage. And he knows about cages. He’s not strong enough to break the joints at his shoulders without either help or something to cut through them, which means that this is as good as it’s going to get for the moment. At the very least, the breastplate is protecting what’s sure to be some truly spectacular bruising to his ribs—if he’s not wrong, he’s thinking there are some cracks. Another good hit might break them completely.
Now for food. He normally needs around ten thousand calories every day—he has a whole other appreciation for the concept of eating like a bird—and the fact that he’s not unconscious means that Apocalypse was doing something for him. Not enough, but something. He supposes that a half-dead Horseman wouldn’t be much use to Apocalypse.
He reels to his feet, looking around him at the wreckage of the armor and feeling a hot surge of disgust rise in his chest. He kicks at the closest scrap, a shoulder pauldron torqued out of shape, and stretches out the metal wings. The feathers click together and the edges ring against one another like chimes. When they reach their fullest point and he thoughtlessly pushes just a bit farther, just enough that he would feel the stretch if they had tendons, feathers as sharp as knives shoot out like bullets. On his right, they plunge into the water; on his left, they thud into a tree, sinking inches into the wood.
For a perilous second, he thinks he might be sick, seeing a flash of memory, himself hurling razor-bladed feathers at a handful of kids about his age.
“Okay,” he breathes, closing his eyes and carefully pulling the wings in. They fold against his back as neatly as his own did, metal cold against the skin of his neck, and he stands there for a moment, feeling the weight of them. Then he shakes them out, ignoring the clatter of metal, and takes off. At least he can fly, with these.
(Maybe this was how it started.)
(The worst he’s ever felt was after the fight in the ring, when the devil-boy threw him into the electric cage and scorched his wing to the bone. He managed to power through the instant scream of pain—the power of the survival instinct—and escape into the street when the cage went down, but once he limped back to the warehouse he had been hiding out in, he was sick with the smell of charred flesh and feathers. The supplies he’d collected before he was kidnapped for the ring was intact, still hidden in a corner only accessible from a rafter. Reaching the rafter was hell, and he barely managed to land on it.)
(He hadn’t missed a landing in three years.)
(He sure as hell wasn’t going to be making it back up if he dropped to the ground, so he slid over to his cache and shucked off his coat, dropping it to the ground. He pulled out one of the bottles of crappy vodka he’d managed to acquire and took a drink for courage before pulling his wing around to get as good a look as possible.)
(His wing was a wreck, all charred feathers and burned flesh. He didn’t need to be a doctor to know that it was a miracle he’d even managed the labored flight out of the ring. Without real medical care, which was so far beyond his financial abilities it was laughable, he didn’t know if he’d be able to pull it off again. He gritted his teeth and poured some of the vodka on the worst of the damage, and his scream of pain echoed.)
(He split the vodka about fifty-fifty. Half was used to try to disinfect his wing, an attempt to stave off an infection that would make his situation even worse; the other half went down his throat, a more effective attempt to at least let him sleep. He dozed off in fits on the rafter, leaning against the wall, and missed the familiar warmth and weight of his wings over him.)
(By the time he woke up, he was in hell. His wing was throbbing, and a quick look showed red and swollen skin around the burns. Infection. The joint was stiff, almost too stiff to bend, and every shift sent pain shooting up his nerves. He could, he thought as he cradled his damaged wing in shaking hands, glide for a little ways if he held both wings as still as possible. Flight was definitely beyond him.)
(He’d forgotten just how much being trapped on the ground felt like dying.)
He wakes up the next morning on the porch of an opulent mansion on the shore, having taken advantage of the vacant building to help himself to their pantry. He pushes the door open again and finishes cleaning them out—anyone who can afford a house this big can replace the lock on the door and the food without breaking a sweat. Canned whatever-he-could-get-his-hands-on isn’t exactly the breakfast of champions, but it’s food, and at this very moment he’s not in a place to be picky. He also takes a small bag that he found in an office and about thirty of the truly terrible, but massively high calorie, protein bars kept in a box labeled ‘Marcus’ without a flicker of guilt.
He knows wealth when he sees it, can look at a building and tell the average income of the residents without blinking. Unless he’s really lost his touch, these people are probably pulling down hundreds of millions yearly, which means that he’s comfortable taking whatever he needs and calling it ‘redistribution of resources.’
Besides, given the general degree of destruction he’s seen on the ground, it might be a while before the owners can get back, and it’s not like he’s trashed the place. So yeah, he takes the food.
Crossing the Mediterranean takes forever. He knows he’s flying northwest rather than straight up—one of the fringe benefits of an avian mutation is an internal compass—and by the time he’s been in the air for an hour or two he’s confident that he’s right about which body of water he’s dealing with, but he failed to appreciate that a sea is…well, it’s a sea.
He’s pretty sure he’s in Italy once he looks down and realizes he’s over any appreciable landmass again, possibly Rome or something given the fact that the landscape is about twenty percent cathedral by volume. He lands on the edge of the largest stone roof he can find, listening to the voices below—the bubbling vowels and curling notes of Italian drift up to him—and he hoods the wings around him like a gargoyle as he pulls out two of the protein bars and eats them so quickly that the taste is an afterthought.
The issue with the metal wings, he’s realizing, is that they’re metal. Beyond the fact that they’re heavier, more lethal, and louder than his wings, they also get hot in the sun, hot enough that he needs to either get under cover and let them cool, or possibly burn himself on the feathers. He drops off the edge of the roof and swoops under its eave, taking shelter from the brilliant sunlight on the broad shelf of a window ledge. A young woman almost jumps out of her skin inside the building—an art museum, mostly empty in the middle of the day—and he winces.
She blurts something in Italian—it sounds rude, startled—and he stares.
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak…I just needed to get out of the sun.”
“Oh, you are American!” she says, her English heavily accented but articulate. “Are those wings?”
“Yes,” he says, feeling his mouth curl into a scowl. “Don’t touch them, they’re hot.”
“Are you—ah, come se dicce, un angelo?” she asks, arching an eyebrow at him and giving the trace of a wry grin.
He used to be good at this. He dusts off a few old skills and gives her a charming smile, looking at her through his eyelashes. He’s lucky that the marks Apocalypse decorated his face with seem to have evaporated, or this wouldn’t work half so well. “Probably not the way you’re thinking. Do you mind if I ask where I am?”
Her smile widens and she cocks one hip out, perching a hand on it. “Catanzaro. Are you lost, angelo?” His smile fades slowly, and she goes from looking amused to looking concerned. “Are you—cazzo, come, come—good?”
“I’m all right,” he says automatically. He tries to smile at her again, but from her expression and the way she drifts closer, it doesn’t work. “I’m a little lost. I’m trying to get back to America.”
“You might have some trouble,” she says. “Did you not hear? The world ended yesterday.”
From the encouraging half-grin, this is supposed to be a joke.
Somehow it’s not very funny.
“Yeah,” he whispers. “I heard.”
She’s perceptive, and walks over to rest her hand on his. “You can stay here, angelo. I will make sure no one comes in.”
“Grazie,” he mutters, the only word of Italian he knows, and she wanders over to the door, making it look like she’s examining a painting.
He stays there until his muscles don’t ache as much and the wings are cold to the touch, then thanks her again and drops from the ledge. She runs to the window and waves as he takes off.
(Maybe this was how it started.)
(He was asleep when they came for him.)
(He never know how they knew where he was, or where they saw him, and someone definitely saw him. It was hard to keep a fourteen-foot wingspan a secret at the best of times. But he was asleep when they came for him, wrapped in his leather jacket with his wings tucked over him like a blanket. He never did figure out what they drugged him with—it could have been as down-and-dirty as chloroform, or maybe they had a mutant who could manage it—but when he woke up he was in the cage, the audience starting to trickle in. He tried to rip off a panel of the wall and almost electrocuted himself, and got an extremely large gun waved in his face. Cooperation it was.)
(He learned some German in his time in the country, largely by necessity, so he was able to figure out what the announcer was saying when the fight was announced. He kind of wished he wasn’t.)
(“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have a very special treat for you! Straight from Heaven, I give you the beautiful, the indomitable Angel!”)
(Yeah, he was pretty sure that cheering wasn’t complimentary. His wings prickled uneasily and he flared them out, mantling them like an angry hawk as his claws bristled. The cheering ratcheted up, some of the booing disappearing, and he scowled. Was it worth putting on a show if it raised his odds of surviving?)
(“And defending his title, I give you our own undefeated champion, the Armored Animal, Spyke!”)
(Spyke was about his age, marching into the ring under his own power, with dark skin, mostly concealed by bone plates and spurs that protruded through his skin, and sharp eyes that swept over his winged opponent. Spyke put on a better show, too, baring his teeth and working the crowd before he pulled one of the bone spurs from his arm. It ended as a five-foot pole, sharp on both ends.)
(He stared at Spyke and heard the announcer shout, “Fight!” Spyke came at him with the bone spear, and he hurled himself into the air, flipping around and landing on the other side of the ring. Gasps and cries of awe rose from the crowd.)
(“If you don’t fight, they’ll kill us both,” Spyke hissed as he snapped the bone spear in half and spun his wrists as if carrying two short swords.)
(“I don’t want to fight,” he whispered back, and Spyke shrugged.)
(“It’s gonna suck to be you, then.”)
(He hadn’t survived this long to be pinned to the floor of a fighting ring like a bug to a specimen board. He lurked just out of reach, waited for Spyke’s next reckless attack, and caught the bone spur in one hand, bringing his wing down on Spyke’s shoulder with all the force he could manage.)
(He never formally considered super strength to be part of his mutation. That being said, it took a massive amount of power to fly at all, let alone the hours he could manage, and he could comfortably bench press the body weight of most human beings. Spyke hit the ground so hard the cage shook, and the crowd went silent with shock as he tried to stand.)
(“Don’t get up,” he warned the boy on the ground. Spyke shot him a look and pulled his feet under him, and one wing snapped out, crashing into his jaw. Spyke dropped, unconscious and bloody, and the crowd roared.)
(Gritting his teeth against the sour taste of adrenaline and disgust, he thrust his wings victoriously into the air, two tall spires of blood-flecked white, and bared his teeth in a cruel smile as the announcer yelled, sounding ecstatic.)
(“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champion, by knockout in the first round! We should have known not to put him up against a mere mortal, our own Avenging Angel!”)
(He marked a line in the wooden floor with a claw and tried to put on a good show, this time.)
Getting over the Atlantic actually proves easier than he expected. He makes it to Portugal and waits for a ship to leave heading west, and just lands on top of the shipping containers. It’s not quite a first class ticket, and it’s less comfortable than the trip over was, but it’ll do for the moment. He steals some food—he actually feels bad about it, this time, because the crew has a limited supply, so he tries to ration his protein bars enough to get him across—and sits on the shipping containers and watches the water pass by.
He’s not sure why he’s going back to America, he has to admit. There’s nothing there for him. But he’s tired of being homeless and alone and on the run, and he can’t hide his wings anymore because the metal isn’t flexible enough to bind down under his clothes. He’s just tired, full stop, in need of a couple nights in a bed and some real food and maybe the opportunity to watch something both terrible and hilarious on TV. He’s just as screwed in America as anywhere else, so it’s worth a try.
He snorts a laugh to himself. Hell, maybe he’ll run into that professor Apocalypse was so determined to kidnap—Charles something-starting-with-X. That would be interesting, at the very least. He’d have a good chance of getting taken out properly by one of his students, which was a negative, but on the other hand…
He stops laughing.
On the other hand, Charles something-starting-with-X talked a good game about protecting mutants, about helping people who need help, from what he remembers. The man even tried to sway Magneto, who was about as determined to be Dark Side as anyone.
His wings have been replaced with metal monstrosities, he needs medical treatment for his ribs and help getting the breastplate off, and he’s in very real danger of starving to death if he doesn’t solve the food problem quickly once they make landfall.
He’s a person who needs help, right?
He’s also a person who tried to kill them under Apocalypse’s command, the more pessimistic side of his brain points out, and he chews on his lower lip. They have no way to confirm that he’s telling the truth about Apocalypse’s control, nor that he’s not all that interested in doing anyone harm. But no, that’s not true, he remembers, the professor—Xavier, his name is Xavier—can read minds.
It’s not the best plan he’s ever come up with. In fact, it might genuinely be one of the worst. But it’s also the only option he can think of.
So they make landfall in Maine and he takes off, flying until he sees a largely isolated house at the edge of a town. He settles in the front yard and knocks.
“Excuse me,” he says politely when a woman answers the door. “Could you tell me where I am?”
She gives him a very dubious look, but says, “You’re in Biddeford, Maine. How much have you had to drink, son?”
“For once, nothing,” he says, dry. “It’s a shame. Would I be able to borrow your phone?”
Her eyes flicker over the wings and he pulls them close, trying to look as harmless as possible. “Fine,” she says shortly. “But just for a few minutes.” She steps back and he slides in, stepping over to her phone.
He picks it up and hits zero, then waits for the operator to pick it up and answer. “Um, yeah, hi,”’ he says once the woman on the other end picks up. “I was wondering if you could give me the address for Professor Charles Xavier. I think it would be in…Massachusetts, maybe? Or New York?”
“Certainly, sir.” There was a brief pause. “Do you mean Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Youngsters, care of Charles Xavier?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“The address for that is 1406 Graymalkin Lane, Salem Center, in Westchester country, New York.”
“Right, thanks,” he said, and hung up the phone, turning back to the woman with another polite smile, the well-bred heir’s smile he’d cultivated for most of his childhood. “Could you tell me what direction Salem Center is in? Or New York State?”
She stares at him. He doesn’t blame her—he’d probably be staring too, to be honest. “South.”
“Great. Thank you, ma’am,” he says, and slips out of her house before she thinks to panic too hard over the wings.
He stops for directions four more times, twice in Massachusetts and twice in New York. He ends up in New Salem—apparently the town isn’t actually called Salem Center—around dinner time, which he tries not to think about too much as he eats the last half of his last protein bar and gets directions one more time. This time, he doesn’t even need to do the talking.
“Hey, kid,” a tall man says as he touches down briefly in a park. “If you’re looking for the freak school, it’s not here. Get out of here.”
“Could you tell me where the…freak school is, then?” he asks, trying not to sound as frustrated as he feels. He’s not in the mood to pick a fight, nor to have one picked with him.
“About four miles north. It’s big as hell, you can’t miss it,” the man says. “Now get fucking lost.”
“Great,” he says wearily, and forces himself into the air again.
He’s exhausted from flying all day under the weight of the wings, and he’s dizzy with hunger and thirst. So he feels like he can be forgiven for the really stupid decision he makes, which is to fly until he sees something big enough to be a good candidate for the ‘freak school’ and glide directly toward the front drive.
“Hey,” he hears from the ground, and people start gathering beneath him.
A girl in a violently yellow coat points at him and says, “That looks like the guy from Egypt. What do we do?”
“Take him down,” a third voice says, steady and determined. The boy in the lead of the group, the speaker, is wearing red glasses, and when his hand comes up to grab them, the other kids back off like he just took the pin out of a grenade.
A red bolt of light bursts from the kid’s eyes—he remembers something like that from Cairo, and he remembers the kind of damage he can expect from being hit full-on. He folds up the wings and drops like a stone, and a voice shakes through him just as the edge of the beam clips the edge of one wing and sends him spiraling.
Scott, stop, he means no harm! the voice commands, and the red beam vanishes instantly. It’s not much help to him, though, because his balance is wrecked from the sidelong strike, and he’s moving too fast to fix it before the ground leaps up at him. He barely manages to turn the headlong crash into a roll, and feels a handful of things give way as he hits the grass, his ribs and left arm among them. He considers getting up, but opts to lie there on his back instead, staring at the sky and trying to breathe shallowly.
“Professor, what should we do?” calls the boy in the lead—Scott—as he approaches.
The professor must have read his mind, he thinks, feeling his ribs grind in his chest, and tries to form a coherent sentence. All he ends up with, though, is reaching up with his uninjured hand and gripping Scott’s wrist tightly when he’s close enough, and whispering, “I’m sorry.”
“What?” Scott asks, crouching down warily and waving the other kids away.
He takes as deep a breath as he can manage and says more loudly, through a scowl, “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you here, Archangel?”
He lets go of Scott’s wrist and levers himself up into a sitting position. When it looks like he might try to stand, Scott’s hand goes back up to his glasses, so he stays on the ground, arm pulled to his chest. “Warren.”
“What?”
“My name. It’s Warren.” It’s the first time he’s said his real name to anyone in years. It settles back over him like water, or wings. “And, um.” He sighs, shaky. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go after I woke up in Cairo.”
“So you came to a bunch of people you tried to kill?” asks a heavily accented voice, and the devil-boy appears at Scott’s shoulder, scowling down at him.
“I—yeah,” he says. It sounds pretty bad when he puts it like that, but yeah, that’s pretty much what Warren did here. “I didn’t want to fight you. Any of you. But he kind of…got inside my head and made me want to help him. Look, I’d go, but.” He stretches out the wing Scott’s blast struck and his breathing stutters as the muscles pull at his ribs. The wing is intact—whatever metal they’re made of is sturdy stuff—but he’s tried to fly with broken ribs before and it doesn’t go well.
Scott, Kurt, the silent voice says. It’s warm and gentle, laden with an upper-class English accent, and both of them straighten up instantly. He’s telling the truth. Bring him inside before he blacks out.
“Before he what?” the devil-boy—he must be Kurt—asks as Warren reels to his feet and feels his head pound brutally. The world around him wavers and Scott’s hand enters his narrowing field of vision abruptly, grabbing his unbroken arm. “Oh,” Kurt says as Warren’s vision speckles black and Scott calls for someone named Jean. “Wunderbar.”
(Maybe this was how it started.)
(He had been flying again. It was late, closer to dawn than midnight, and the cloud cover hung low over the city. The perfect weather for stealthy flight, for striking through the clouds and gliding above them. He was drenched from passing through the clouds, water droplets rolling off his skin and dripping from his feathers, and would have been freezing to death if not for his mutation helping to regulate his temperature to ‘bordering on uncomfortable’ rather than ‘lethal,’ and he was going to be dead on his feet tomorrow after flying for three hours.)
(Not even coasting back to his balcony could wipe the grin off his face.)
(He landed and shook out his wings, water pattering down like a small rainstorm. He would need to bind them down again soon, but for now they stretched fourteen feet from tip to tip, white feathers layered neatly over each other. The long pinions were tough, but near the root and at the broad expanse just below his second shoulder, the soft down was right below the top layer, where he could bury his fingers when he wrapped them around himself.)
(He picked up his shirt and a towel from where he’d abandoned them on the balcony and walked inside, using the towel to dry the worst of the water from his hair so that, the next morning, it would look like he had simply taken a shower the night before. These night flights had been going on since his wings had grown in, four years now, a private delight—at first he had barely been able to fly for thirty minutes, but now he could stretch these flights out for hours. They were hard to conceal from his father, but he hated being stuck on the ground. It was torture, so overwhelmingly claustrophobic that he wanted to scream whenever weeks passed without a flight.)
(“How was your flight, Warren?” a cold voice asked, and his heart stopped.)
(“Father,” he said, turning slowly to face the man standing against the wall beside the door to his balcony. Mister Worthington looked almost nothing like his son, except in coloring. They had the same blond hair, but where Warren’s curls were unruly and looked wind-ruffled at the best of times, his father’s hair was straight and neatly gelled into place. They had the same blue eyes, but given Warren’s success with charming whoever he needed to, he could only assume that his were nowhere near as glacial as his father’s. “I can explain–”)
(“I don’t care what you have to say,” his father said, cutting him off cleanly. “Is it true that you’ve been flying outside for four years?”)
(Warren fixed his eyes on a point three inches left of his father’s ear. “Yes, sir.”)
(“Against my express orders?”)
(“Yes, sir,” Warren repeated, feeling his chest clench tight. The air seemed thick, as if it wasn’t getting into his lungs properly, and he could feel his hands trying to shake.)
(His father stepped forward from the wall, the predatory walk Warren was used to seeing when his father was entering a board room to destroy a company outright. “So you mean to tell me,” he said quietly, “that you’ve been risking exposing your…abnormality to the world and disgracing this family? And the whole time, you’ve been eating my food and living under my roof like some kind of parasite?”)
(“Yes, sir,” Warren forced himself to say a third time, and couldn’t muster up a single iota of surprise when his father’s hand struck his cheek, hard. Not quite hard enough to knock him down, though, which didn’t seem to go over well.)
(He could tell because his father grabbed him by the shoulder, thumb pressing hard into the hollow of Warren’s throat, and shoved him back until his balance gave way.)
(From one knee, his wings thrown out to his sides, his father looked very tall indeed.)
(“While you live in my home, you’ll uphold the Worthington name. And that means concealing…those until we can find a way to solve this,” his father said, gesturing disdainfully to his outstretched wings.)
(Warren froze, pulling his wings around him as if the feathers could protect him. “Solve this?”)
(His father’s lip curled. “There’s a cure for every disease, Warren. Don’t convince yourself this one is a blessing.”)
(The words were incomprehensible through the roar of blood in Warren’s ears. “Wait, you want to take my wings?” he blurted, and he was on his feet without really knowing how he got there. “You want to cut them off?”)
(“Warren,” his father said sternly. “We’ve discussed this. I can’t have you running around looking like a freak show exhibit–”)
(“I won’t let you take them,” Warren said flatly, and his father looked taken aback. He had never interrupted his father before, and he was almost shaking with the adrenaline of doing it now. His voice, though, was as calm and implacable as deep water. “I won’t, and you can’t make me.”)
(“You are my son,” Mister Worthington said, cheeks starting to flush with anger. “And you’ll do as I say while you live in my house.”)
(“Sure,” Warren said, feeling light-headed. “Okay.” He turned on his heel and grabbed the first sturdy jacket his hands encountered, balling it up and tucking it under one arm. “Do you want me to leave by the front door or off the balcony?”)
(“Warren,” his father said. “Don’t do anything foolish. What would your mother say?”)
(Warren took a deep breath, let it out, and spoke in his most emotionless voice. “I think she’d want to know when you decided that cutting pieces off your son was an appropriate thing to do.” And he turned his back on his father, taking a light running start to the balcony and flinging himself off the ledge.)
(At least if he starved to death on the street, he’d do it with all six of his own limbs attached.)
He wakes up and, given recent events, thinks he can be forgiven for immediately striking out at the person closest to him. His fist catches something, hard, but he’s pinned back to the stretcher immediately and…comprehensively.
Hey, calm down, says a silent voice—a new one, not the professor. It’s a girl, with a soft voice and a presence like a bonfire. I’ll let you up if you stop fighting.
Warren blinks several times, realizes that he’s being held down with telekinesis, which is how they’re managing to pin not just his arms but also the wings, and forces his muscles to relax.
“Jean, let him go,” orders the accented voice of the professor. “Scaring him half to death won’t help the situation, and I’ve been hit harder before.” The force holding him down slowly, reluctantly, lifts away, and the professor appears back at the side of the stretcher, carefully maneuvering a wheelchair around the wings. He has a bruise starting to rise on his jawline, and sometime between the cracks of Warren’s memory, he lost his hair. Possibly the strangest thing about him is the fact that, as he dabs a hand curiously to his lip and finds blood leaking from where Warren hit him, he doesn’t look angry.
“Are–” Warren starts, and finds that his voice is mostly shot. His throat is too dry to swallow.
“Easy, young man,” the professor says, and a red-haired girl appears beside him, a glass of water in hand. “Scott said your name was Warren, is that correct? Thank you, Jean.” The professor takes the water and offers it to Warren, who stares for a moment before propping himself up clumsily and taking it gratefully in his uninjured hand.
After a few sips, he can at least sort of speak. “Yes. You’re the professor, right? Xavier?”
Xavier’s eyebrows shoot upward. “I am. You’ll have to excuse me, I was under the impression you knew who I was already.”
Warren stares at the cup of water. “I don’t remember a lot of the last. Um. I don’t know. How long has it been?”
“A week.”
“Yeah. It’s spotty at best.”
“Ororo said she could remember everything, but it was a little fuzzy,” the redhead says to the professor—Jean, she must be the telekinetic, and from the voice she’s also the telepath from before. “And Magneto said it was all clear for him.”
“Yes,” Xavier says thoughtfully. “And when she let me look into her memories, there were traces of some kind of compulsion attached to his enhancement of her powers. Erik has always been powerful, and furthermore inclined toward Apocalypse’s own methods, so there was no compulsion used. Warren, may I ask if you tried to resist Apocalypse?”
The metal wings clatter, the feathers shifting in a mechanical mockery of the way his wings bristled with nerves. “I tried to tell him to fuck off,” Warren admits. “And when that didn’t work, I tried to leave. Hard to leave when someone’s doing…this to you, though.” He flexes the wings again.
“What do you mean?” Xavier asks gently, and Jean’s eyes widen as she stumbles back.
“Oh God,” she whispers. “You didn’t want them.”
Warren catches a drop of condensation on his finger as it slides down the outside of the glass and flicks it away, watching the clean track of it. “I wanted to fly again,” he says, voice blank. A bitter smirk twists his lips, settling onto his face out of long habit. “Not sure it’s worth it. He sure as hell didn’t ask permission, though.”
There’s a long beat of silence, and the professor’s hand lands on Warren’s uninjured arm. “Why did you come here, Warren? What were you looking for? We cannot take your metal wings away.”
“I just needed help, okay?” Warren snaps, tugging away from Xavier’s touch. “I—I just–” To his horror, Warren finds that the tightness in his chest, in his throat, isn’t the broken ribs. He’s on the edge of tears. He hasn’t cried since his father kicked him out.
He takes a few breaths, as deep as he can manage against the ribs and the breastplate, and tries to get himself under control.
“I woke up in Egypt,” he says once he’s pretty sure that his voice won’t break. “And I didn’t speak the language, and all the stuff I had collected in Berlin was gone, and I needed someone to cut this thing off,” he raps the heel of his hand sharply against the breastplate, “and I needed food and you—you tried to get Magneto to listen to you and you said that you helped people and–”
The panic is catching up with him, and when he drags in a breath to keep talking, it’s too deep and sends pain screeching through his chest. He clenches his teeth and there’s a high whine, as if from a wounded animal, and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s him.
The girl, Jean, looks sympathetic, and her voice in his head is softer than before. It’s okay, she whispers. We won’t make you leave while you’re hurt.
“Get out of my head,” Warren mutters dully, clenching his fists and trying to slow his breathing. The scarlet heat at the edge of his mind retreats, and he hadn’t realized that was her until it’s gone.
“I’m sorry,” Jean says. “Sometimes I forget that not everyone is comfortable. I won’t talk to you like that again unless you’re all right with it.” She pauses, eyes distant for a moment. “Professor,” she says, and Warren realizes that she’s speaking out loud as a courtesy, keeping him apprised of the situation. “Kurt and Ororo are on their way. Kurt…he’s not happy. They’re arguing.”
“Please update them. Inform them that Warren will be staying with us at least until he’s recovered, and that he’s to be made welcome,” Xavier says calmly, as if he’s not discussing letting someone who tried to kill them live in his house. “They are welcome to come inside as long as they behave themselves.”
Jean nods and her eyes go absent again—she must be speaking with their distant friends.
“Who the hell’s Ororo?” Warren asks. The devil-boy, Kurt, he understands that, but he doesn’t know an Ororo.
“I believe you would have known her as Storm,” Xavier tells him. Warren casts around for that memory, and comes up with the flicker of lightning between hands and a shock of white hair crowning a narrow dark face. She can fly, he recalls.
“Herr Professor,” Kurt is already saying when he bursts into the infirmary with the white-haired girl—Storm, Ororo—on his heels. “You can’t be serious! He tried to kill us!”
“I tried to kill you, too,” Ororo shoots back, her accent thick with anger, and she’s…defending him, Warren realizes slowly. “I don’t see you kicking me onto the street!”
“You fought with us when you realized what he was doing, he didn’t!” Kurt half-shouts, jabbing a finger in Warren’s direction. “He tried to kill me before he ever met Apocalypse!”
“I didn’t,” someone says. Warren realizes when the room goes silent that it was him. Damn. Now he has to keep talking and explain. “I wouldn’t have killed you. I just would have knocked you out.”
“Ja, because that’s much better,” Kurt says, sarcastic. “Very generous.”
“They would have killed us both if I’d refused to fight,” Warren says, surging forward off the bed, because it suddenly feels vitally important that Kurt understand this. “I didn’t exactly sign up, and they knew they were making money off having me in the ring. If I refused to fight they would have killed you and shot me as a warning and made me fight handicapped.”
The angry snarl on Kurt’s face, all the more alarming for the sharp teeth visible behind his lips, flickers for a moment. “They…kidnapped you too?”
“Months ago,” Warren says.
The anger fades into a scowl. “I don’t trust you.”
Warren huffs something that might be a laugh, in another situation, and closes his eyes, broken arm curled around broken ribs, false metal wings cradled around the lot. “Yeah,” he says, because Warren can do sarcasm too. “And that makes you real unique.”
(Maybe this was how it started.)
(When Warren was ten, he woke up feeling like someone had pulled all his bones out of place. It hurt like nothing he’d ever experienced. It hurt too much to breathe, let alone stand. It was a clean sort of pain, like the crippling burn in a muscle after running too fast and too far, and it was everywhere, swarming through his bones and down his nerves like fire.)
(“Mister Worthington, you have to get up for school,” Concha said, peeking through the half-open door. The maid frowned at him and came inside, stepping quietly over to the edge of his bed and sitting down. “Warren?”)
(“I think I’m sick,” Warren managed to make himself whisper, and she pressed a hand to his cheek, her skin cool against the hot flush of pain.)
(“Hijo,” she sighed, stroking her thumb over the soft curve of his cheek. “You’re burning up.”)
(“I hurt,” he said, and his voice shook as he closed his hand around Concha’s wrist. “I hurt so much.” He could hear his father’s voice in the back of his head, telling him to man up and stop whimpering, but Concha didn’t say anything, just made a soothing croon in the back of her throat and stroking his cheek again.)
(“Angelito, you should go to the doctor,” she said. “I’ll make an appointment, sí?”)
(Warren surged up off the bed, feeling every muscle scream, and clung to her sleeve. “Concha, Dad’ll be so mad if there’s nothing wrong, I—I’m sure it’s just the flu, it’ll go away, I–” He struggled to put a sentence together through the bright-hot fog of pain, tried to make his tongue work, and finally fell back on giving her a desperate look and gasping, “Concha, por favor, no le informas.”)
(Concha sighed and tipped him forward gently to press a kiss between his eyes. “For today, hijo. If you get worse, I’ll have to tell him or I could get fired.”)
(He nodded slowly. “Okay.”)
(“Is there anything I can do for you, angelito?” she asked, brushing curls away from his face. He shook his head, sinking back onto the bed and gritting his teeth against the immediate urge to scream. There was a pair of raw spots stretching up his back, bracketing his ribs, and he couldn’t imagine where they had come from, only that they hurt. “I’ll tell your father you’re sleeping off a fever, bien? He won’t come looking for you as long as I keep an eye on you.”)
(She left when he insisted that he was exhausted and he lurched into the ensuite bathroom. He looked awful, worse than he’d anticipated, his skin grey and clammy with red smudges high on his cheeks, his curls soaked with sweat. Peeling out of his shirt was a fight, every joint stiff, and when his fists clenched, the cloth simply gave way under his grip, as if it was tissue paper. It was a question for later. He managed to twist enough to see his back, and the sight made him almost sick. His skin was rough, rippled in places, and looked as if someone had sanded it down to the point just before it would bleed. The pressure beneath his skin was unbearable, sharp points of discomfort pushing out away from his ribs, and as he stared, a muscle spasm shook down his back in a way that he didn’t think muscles were supposed to move.)
(His father would be furious, Warren thought, and closed his eyes, as if it would make the strange distortions disappear. He stumbled into the shower and blindly turned on the cold water, sitting down clumsily on the floor. The wash of cool water soothed some of the pain in his joints, eased the itching burn streaked up his back. It took a while for him to realize fully that he had forgotten to take off his pajama pants, the soft cotton soaked and plastered to his skin, and it seemed unfathomably difficult to stand and take them off.)
(Warren dozed, he thought, under the cool wash of the water. Every blink seemed to drag on for minutes, the slow rise of his chest with each breath pulling him down into sleep only for the prickling twinge of pain to bring him back to the surface. He tipped his head back against the wall, out of the spray, and closed his eyes, trying to push away the ache.)
(When he opened his eyes some indeterminate time later, gazing dully around himself, the water swirling around him was tinged pink. The cracking ache in his back had started to change into something else, a bright and slashing pain, and when he reached back, he encountered…he didn’t know what. Something soft and slick and ribbed, and moving.)
(He shut his eyes again, squeezing them shut, and hoped blindly that when he opened them, the world would be normal again. He didn’t know how long he sat there, eyes clenched closed. Concha came into the bedroom and called something to him that he couldn’t hear over the water, and left again. His phone rang, more than once, the sound making him wince and curl around himself, and the movement hurt more.)
(At last, he was too cold to stay under the water, wracked by shivers that prickled strangely over his…shoulders? Back? Something. When he tried to move, fumbling to wrap his fingers around the handle of the shower door, every muscle howled in protest, creaking like wood being bent out of shape. He hauled himself to his feet, dripping pink-tinged water from his pajama pants and blessedly clear from his sopping hair, and staggered over to the sink.)
(He looked up, and maybe it was the exhaustion, or the cold, but there was no visceral shock of horror at the thing in the mirror. It was his face, haggard and drawn, as if feverish, and his chest, but there was a frame of something, something he had never seen before, something that his brain blankly rejected for a long moment.)
(Wings, his brain finally, reluctantly, reported. They seemed to have ripped straight out of his back, through his skin, and they were wet with blood and a clear, slick fluid that reminded him of the time he’d peeled the skin off a sunburn. The feathers—oh, God, there were feathers. Warren felt tears tremble in his eyes and clamped a hand over his mouth, biting into the muscle at the base of his thumb to muffle a cry. The sound that crept out around his skin was a high, strangled moan of fear, like an injured dog.)
(“Dad’s going to kill me,” he whispered to his reflection, and the mirror-Warren stared back at him with teary, bloodshot blue eyes. He reached back with a shaking hand and touched the feathers—soft down, barely enough to cover the skin. Some half-memory surfaced, a science class, and he wondered numbly if long pinfeathers would grow in, and if that, too, would hurt.)
(The wings shifted, spread as wide as they could. They were sad little things, like a baby bird’s, and it made him smile faintly as they twitched. He could feel the muscles, aching and hypersensitive, work along their length, and when he stroked the wet down again, he let out a small, startled laugh. A few more tears tracked down his cheeks, and the wings—his wings—shifted again, pulling close around his shoulders.)
(His father was going to disown him, or kill him, or something he hadn’t even thought of yet. But…wings.)
(Maybe one day he would even be able to fly with them.)
It’s the girl with the red hair and the girl with the white hair who come to help him finally—finally—get the damn breastplate off. His broken arm has been braced, after he stated flat-out that a cast would be pointless given how fast he heals. He’d been ready for that to get a response, shock or even anger, but no one batted an eye. They’ve left him alone for a while, an hour or two by, and he was tempted to call that naivete at first—who left an enemy alone in a room full of medical equipment, what kind of idiot did that? But then again with two telepaths in their number, and that enemy broken and in need of help and not such an enemy after all, maybe it was just that they didn’t consider him a threat.
He’s had some time to think about it, by now, and he’s decided that he’s fine with not being a threat. He thinks that, between Apocalypse and the fighting ring, he’s all right with never being considered a threat again. There’s some kind of lifetime quota, right?
Warren? The burning scarlet presence at the edge of his mind is back, but it feels…hesitant. He wonders why for a second before he remembers telling her to get out of his head.
He looks around the room for help for a minute before he gives up and says, “Yeah?”
He thinks the girl—Jean, he remembers—laughs at him, bright and glittering in her scarlet presence. Ororo and I think we can get your armor off, we brought Scott and boltcutters. Can we come in?
This time he keeps his mouth shut and tries to think it at her, as directly as he can. Sure.
“You learn quick,” Jean is saying as she walks in with Ororo and Scott in her wake. Ororo looks—not friendly, but open, which makes up for the fact that Scott has a skeptical look on his face and a combat-ready look in his stance. “Not so loud, though, you’ll blow a fuse. Now, Ororo, Warren, you two met before.”
This time, Ororo comes forward, a shy smile on her face, and offers him her hand. Her voice is heavily accented, lilting warmly, and her shock of white hair drifts into her eyes a little, giving her a mysterious look.
“I am Ororo Munroe,” she says. “Or Storm. It’s good to meet you properly, Archangel.”
“Um,” Warren says, and takes her hand awkwardly with his uninjured one. “Just Warren. Angel.” He’d rather use the shorter form than ever be addressed as Archangel again, Apocalypse’s crooning title for him.
“Angel,” she echoes, and her hand is calloused in odd lines, but strong and steady in his. Her dark eyes sweep over his wings, over the breastplate they’ve come to remove, and her smile fades, guilt washing over her face. “I am sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he says, and without thinking he gives her hand a reassuring squeeze before releasing it. “You couldn’t have said no to him—trust me,” he adds dryly, and she laughs a little.
“You would be the expert, wouldn’t you,” she says, and she’s smiling again, but she looks sad. Jean rests a hand on Ororo’s wrist and slides past her, brisk and efficient. Her fiery hair is bound up into a loose knot at the back of her head, as if she tied it up to keep it out of the way, and she taps a considering finger against the upper part of the breastplate. Her free hand holds a small, sturdy set of boltcutters.
“What’s this made of?” she asks, curious. Warren shrugs as best he can and she hums thoughtfully as she prods the links over his shoulders, the only weak point on the entire breastplate—and that had been covered by his pauldrons, before. “How’d you get the rest of the armor off?”
Warren’s answer is flat. “I pulled. Most of it had more weak points, so I just ripped it off.”
Scott makes a noise and Jean shoots him a scowl over her shoulder, and Warren doesn’t need to hear it to know that she’s saying something telepathically, because Scott winces a little and lets his face soften.
“Be nice,” Jean says as she turns back to Warren. “I think I can get this off without these. Here.” She hands the boltcutters over to Ororo and squints at the links, her hand hovering over them. “Better close your eyes, Warren. Just—uh. To be safe?”
He’s not going to fucking argue with her. He’s officially decided that arguing with Jean is a bad idea. He closes his eyes. There’s a sound like ice shattering and something sharp stings his cheek, and Jean makes an apologetic noise as he opens his eyes.
“Sorry,” she says, reaching out and touching his jaw. Her fingers come away spotted with blood. “Metal shards. Just a few nicks, they’ll heal quick. Can you stand up?” Warren nods and she holds out a hand as if to help him up, and he stares at her. “Fine,” she huffs, dropping her hand. “Do it yourself.”
Standing hurts, because he’s been lying down long enough that he’s used to not being in pain. He’s dizzy, too—he doesn’t know how long it’s been since he ate, but apparently long enough that standing up makes black spots bloom in his vision. There’s a terrifying moment where all he’s aware of is wavering on his feet, feeling the world spin under him, and when his vision clears, Scott is holding on to his uninjured arm and the massive weight of the metal wings is being invisibly supported by Jean.
“Are you all right?” Scott asks, and Warren can see his eyebrows arch behind his red glasses. “That looked like a pretty bad dizzy spell, man.”
“I’m fine,” Warren says. “Just hungry.”
“Oh, God,” Jean says, and she knocks a closed fist against her forehead, as if this is something that should have occurred to her. “Of course you are. Your metabolism must be through the roof, right? We’ll get you some food as soon as we get this thing off, the kitchen here is always stocked.”
Ororo gives him a wry smile and adds, “If you’re anything like me, Angel, it’ll be more food than you’ve seen in years. Jean, can you…?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jean mutters. “Warren, tell me if this hurts you at all, okay?”
And she rests her hands above his shoulders, fingers clawed, and makes a wrenching motion. The metal of the breastplate strains and screams, but she twists the shoulders down, and then when she tugs it down, the case slips down his torso, and he can step out of it easily. Being able to breathe without its confinement is so glorious that, for a second, he forgets that he’s still in pain.
“Thanks,” he says quietly, pressing his palm against his ribs and feeling his heart rattle underneath. “It’s good to be out of that thing.”
“Yeah,” Jean says, giving it a spiteful kick. “Come on, we can get you some food and some real clothes.”
“I don’t need clothes,” Warren says, the metal wings mantling around him the same way his own used to, making him look bigger and steadier and dangerous. “I’ll be out of your way as soon as my ribs are better, shouldn’t be more than a week or so.”
Ororo frowns at him, and her clear dark eyes are as solemn as a child’s. “You are not staying?” She sounds almost wistful, like she wants him to stay, and he wonders what she could possibly be thinking. It’s a shame he’s not telepathic.
“I.” He means to finish the sentence, but instead he closes his mouth and looks away from her. I tried to kill them, he means to say. At least you saw the light, at the end, might be the end of that sentence. Then again, it might be I just destroy things. He manages a smile, a good imitation of his flashing charm, and says, “What, you guys want the Angel of Death hanging around? After everything?”
Jean unties her hair, letting it fall in a wild copper sheet around her face and shoulders. Elastic around her wrist, she stuffs her hands into the pockets of her overlarge blue blazer, staring straight ahead as if determined to pretend that she can’t see any of them.
“The professor had to place a mental block on me,” she says, perfectly flat. “When I was nine, he hid my memories and walled off my powers, so that I didn’t kill everyone in a hundred yard radius.”
“What?” Warren can’t for the life of him figure out what her non-sequitur has to do with their conversation.
“My best friend was hit by a car,” Jean is saying, merciless as a rockslide, “and my powers kicked in. I was in her mind when she died. I couldn’t deal with it and I couldn’t stand to have anyone’s mind near mine, so I would drive people away with telekinesis if they came near me. The professor finally found me and placed the block, because if he hadn’t, I would have killed someone in a panic. He took the block off over a couple of years, once I was old enough to cope, but I’ve still almost burned down the school three times.”
“I don’t–”
“And Scott blasted half his high school to rubble when his powers manifested,” she continues, and Scott makes a guilty noise. “And Ororo tried to electrocute all of us, and Pietro’s Magneto’s kid, and my point is that, unless you have a home to be getting back to, you’re going to stay.”
“I–” Jean sweeps off toward the door with no indication of having heard him, leaving Warren standing motionless with his mouth still open.
Scott sighs and claps him on his uninjured shoulder, cautious and gentle. “There’s no point arguing with her. I’ve been here like two weeks and I’ve figured that out already.” He offers Warren a small, genuine grin and says, “Welcome to the Institute.”
(Maybe this was how it started.)
(He was seven, and his mother was still alive.)
(A blue girl was saving the world on live television, and Warren was sitting there, mouth open and eyes wide.)
(“She’s so pretty,” he breathed.)
(“Yeah, baby?” his mother asked, smiling down at him.)
(“I want to be just like her when I grow up,” he declared, and his mother’s smile faltered as his father stormed into the room. It vanished when he turned off the television and glared down at his son.)
(“No, you don’t, Warren,” his father said sharply. “She’s a freak. It’s unnatural, what those people are, a disease. Someday we’ll find a cure for it.” Warren’s eyes were damp, but he bit his lip and didn’t cry. It made his father angry when he cried. “I don’t ever want to hear you say something like that again, do you understand me, Warren?”)
(“Yes, Dad,” Warren said quietly, once he thought he could talk without his voice cracking. “I understand.”)
This is how it goes on, though.
Warren has been at Xavier’s for almost a month. His arm and ribs are healed, all his bruises gone—except for the metal wings, he’s in perfect form again. He and Kurt have buried the hatchet, and Ororo forces him to fly with her every day, even when he can’t stand to see the metal wings stretch at his sides, knife-bladed and shining. The girl, Jean, doesn’t so much make friends with him as install herself at his side and glower ominously at anyone who questions her. He doesn’t know what the extent of her abilities might be, but apparently when Jean Grey glowers ominously at someone, they cut and run pretty quick, so fuck it, he’ll take it. The boy from Egypt, Scott, is a little warier, but within a week or two he’s grinning and making jokes—especially once a man with a shaggy haircut and a baffled expression coalesces out of sunlight on a particularly hot day.
No one pushes Warren to disclose his last name, no one seems to find it odd that he doesn’t talk about his life prior to his stint in the fighting ring. He sees other mutants every day, kids with blue skin and fur and lightning at their fingertips, and for the first time in years he’s not weird, among them. Jubilee does a fireworks show for him when he gets the brace off his arm and looks like he’s made her day when he reacts with delight.
It’s not all good. The wings are still there. They ache where they connect, and it’s getting worse, has been for weeks. He has days where he wants to cut them off again, because he hates them, and when Jean touches his hand to try to soothe him, she flinches back from the roiling black loathing. Ororo has to throw sparks at him and kick up gale winds, to drive him into the sky on those days, but he goes without too much of a fight, because it’s better up there. He can’t feel the wind ruffle through his feathers and he’s off balance with the lack of it, but he can still leave his problems on the ground.
And then one day he lands, and there’s something minutely wrong with the landing, a tiny fluctuation in his aerodynamics that he would never notice without the heightened senses his mutation grants. He sweeps the wings around, takes a moment to brace himself before touching the metal, but it’s Ororo, landing in a whirlwind beside him, who reaches out and grips something.
“Angel,” she says, and there’s wonder in her voice.
“What,” he says, flat and stiff with anxiety. If there’s something wrong with the metal wings, he’ll die—no drama, no exaggeration, he will die, because all that’s keeping him steady with their weight on his back is the knowledge that they’ll let him fly. If he can’t fly, and he still has to carry Apocalypse’s monstrous gift on his back, he doesn’t know how he’ll live with that.
She tugs lightly until something gives way and the others, gathering close, make sounds of shock.
“Here,” she says, and hands him a feather. It’s metal, and it’s been plucked out at the root—his hand shakes when he takes it, and he can feel a panic attack sweeping toward him like a tide. The wings, the wings are breaking, and he’s going to be trapped on the ground forever, dragging this useless metal curse around, and—
And a three-fingered grip closes around his wrist and pulls his hand around to touch the place where Ororo pulled out the feather.
“It’s okay, Warren,” Kurt says, and guides Warren’s fingers to the place, high on the curve of the left metal wing. Warren’s fingers graze clumsily over metal, tiny nicks opening against the razor-sharp edges, and he sees Jean’s gaze flick over what must be blood. Metal, and the panic is rising again, metal, metal, metal—feather.
He freezes, because if this is a hallucination or a trick of his mind, he’s going to break something. But it’s a feather, settled back into place, having forced out the metal feather that lay on top—it’s one of his feathers, he doesn’t even need to see it to know. It’s stiff, damp with lymph and blood, and just touching it shifts the quill slightly and sends a jolt of pain through his wing—his wing, his wing, still there and living under the metal feathers that will fall away and leave him whole again. He has a moment of perfect precognition, and sees the metal feathers falling away like leaves from a tree, his own feathers growing back, aching, wet, his. The ache at the base of the metal wings is a familiar one, suddenly, the ache of growth, and his shaking fingers give the feather another nudge to send another sharp bolt of pain through his nerves. It’s the best thing he’s ever felt.
Warren’s legs give out and he sits down with a thud, the metal feathers over his wings clattering around him. The others look down at him in alarm as he flops onto his back, and he laughs, and laughs, and laughs. His wings with their false feathers are spread out around him on the grass, and the sun is on his face, and he is surrounded by people like him, who like him.
For the first time since the devil-boy—back when he was the devil-boy, before he was Nightcrawler or Kurt—threw him into the electric fence, maybe for the first time since his father threw him out or since his wings grew all those years ago, Warren really believes he might not die.
