Wings

42: For The Rest Of Our Lives

NPOV

Track: Wings, Birdy

I remember a time before Will Solace. The days were muffled, bleak, dim, as if they were spent underwater—I never realized how much each day blended into all the others, every moment overshadowed by a constant, vigilant look over my shoulder to check for hunters. I thought that because I was floating, not drowning, that I must be doing pretty well for myself.

And then the golden boy pulls me from the depths, oxygen fills my lungs. Reality becomes a little sharper, and the sunshine reaches me more easily than before.

The days after the introduction of Will Solace are so much different than anything I had ever experienced before. It's the feeling of taking a deep, gasping breath for the first time, and then tension leaves your body. It's the feeling of falling asleep after too many days awake, the feeling of swallowing the first bite of food after too long spent starving, the feeling of the first rays of sun warming up the earth after so many months of winter.

The thing about Will Solace is that every thread of his being is made of gentle kindness, stubborn hope. It's infectious. It's exhilarating. You'd think an emotion like the ones brought on by Will's fingers on my skin might be too much for anyone to handle—after all, he makes me feel like I've swallowed the sun, warm and full of energy—but somehow Will makes me feel bigger, too. I grow with my love for him. (Sometimes I swear his fingertips must be made of magic, what with the feelings he draws out of me just by grazing them down my arms, wings, scalp, chest—he touches whatever he can, like he's going to be tested on it. Like he's planning to sculpt me.

Will Solace isn't the only thing different in my life now.

It's strange to have friends. I've never really had that before. But now, Annabeth and Percy teach me how to play their favorite childhood games, letting their nostalgia take over as they explain the rules to whatever new activity they've remembered. Some of the knights from the castle have started visiting us in the village, too—Jason and Leo, the two who helped me escape. They never quite know what to say when they show up on my doorstep, it seems, but when I offer to train with them, they relax and smile like they had been hoping I would find an excuse for them to stay. We spend our evenings using branches as swords, and they claim it's cheating when I use my wings, but I do it anyway.

Senators, villagers, even the new Praetor Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano visit me on occasion. When Will is working, when there's no work to be done, there's almost always a friendly face to spend an afternoon with. It's strange—in some ways, I've come to look forward when these people are around. When Senator Hazel Levesque and her husband Senator Frank Zhang show up, I am surprised to find that I'm happy to invite them inside my house and ask if they would like a drink. When they start out apologizing on behalf of the Senate for what nearly happened to me, I wave them off. When the conversation turns to how the village is treating me, and then to what it's like to fly, and then what it's like to be a senator, and on and on to different topics...

Well, I find myself smiling.

And by the time they leave, I'm tired, so tired, but in a way that's so much better than the way I used to feel tired.

And there's one other person who's new—or, rather, old but returned.

Bianca di Angelo has a cottage in the village, a vacation home. She doesn't stay often, or very long—most of her time is spent in the sky, serving Hades and trying to do some good in the universe.

But the important part is that on occasion, a shooting star will light up the sky, and I sit up from my usual spot on the roof, grinning. Every time, I scramble down the ladder to the bedroom I share with Will—I'm warming up to the idea of sleeping indoors—and say, "She's visiting!" no matter what ridiculous time of night it is. Will, sitting at the desk reading or standing at the wardrobe searching for sleep clothes, always looks up and smiles at me.