Clipped Wings

Finch

You sit in the cozy rocking chair, it's soft squeaking the only noise. Shouta and Keigo are both working, but promised they'd be home early today.

Snow blankets the cityscape, freshly fallen even as you watch; fat flakes whirl like you once danced in the breeze. How you miss the way the wind felt through your feathers...

Your wings stir in memory, and you sigh. Your wings have been clipped twice more since that first time, and each is a nail in your coffin. They still don't trust you. Is it any wonder though?

When you started showing, you stopped trying to hide your real feelings. You cry at the drop of a hat and they blame pregnancy hormones. Neither want to think that you're unhappy, that you're a caged bird dealing with bringing children into this world to two monsters. That maybe that's why you cry. It's so frustrating that you could scream, and you have, sometimes until your throat is raw. It makes no difference.

Although you've not cried at all today.

Instead, you feel numb. You rock back and forth in the nursery with its soft white decorations, perfect for any gender (they want to wait so it'll be a surprise) and gaze out at the grey and white world.

Once, you'd felt hope on snowy mornings like this. The world was wiped clean, a blank slate. Now you only want to lay in bed and sleep the day away, but that isn't good for the baby.

You can't have caffeine anymore. You have a strict bedtime. You are taken for walks almost like you're a dog or something. Anything for the baby. It's exhausting.

You want to hate what's growing inside you, but you can't bring yourself to. After all, it's your only company here in the small, cruel world of your confinement. And the kid will be innocent in all this.

You hum and stroke your belly through the pale blue maternity dress. You've never been much of a songbird, but you find yourself singing more than ever now. Maybe it's an instinct to calm the baby and get it used to your voice.

There's a flutter in your stomach and you look down to see movement. You like to imagine that's a wing brushing your insides, and that they will come out purple and streaked like your own. That you won't know which man to hate more for impregnating you because the baby will be so you that they may as well not have a father.

Another insistent movement and you sigh. "Fine. I'll get us a snack." You wobble to the kitchen and pull out two bags— one full of sunflower seeds and the other empty for the shells. You begin munching on the salt treat as you head back to the nursery.

There's already a toddler bed as well as the crib. The bassinet is in the master bedroom. You really hope the toddler bed isn't a hint that you're expected to have children back-to-back. Is that even healthy?

Like they care. As long as you're doing what they want, kept here in your gilded cage, they probably don't have a care for what's actually good for you.

If they did, they never would have captured you. They never would have clipped your wings.

You spit a shell into the bag. "They'll never do that to you," you promise your unborn child. "I'll kill them first."

You mean it, too. Or you'd do worse and kill yourself. Then they'd be alone in the world with a child whose existence they can't explain. Maybe they'd put the kid up for adoption and the little one could live a normal life.

You doubt it, but you can dream, right?

You begin rocking again, your humming only interrupted by the spitting of shells and the munching on seeds.

Notes:

I'm considering writing a second part where our finch is a new mother-bird and fights against the guys to escape, maybe outs them as monsters, but I also like ending things ambiguously, so...

Maybe someday.

ANYWAY, thanks for journeying with me. I had a lot of fun writing this fic; after about the sixth chapter, it all came pretty fast.

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TTFN