The White Wolves

Homecoming

Maya

The moment the plane had left the ground, the security guards had their hands on my arms, no longer having an audience to perform to they steered my reluctant legs towards the lift shaft. I didn't resist: not when they shoved me into the lift where a gurney awaited me; not when they forced me into it causing my invisible wings to feel like they were being crushed in a vice; not when they strapped down my struggling limbs with stone-cold and unyielding chains of metal;not when the lift began to descend into the hospital till we had passed the floors of living patients and into the realms of the dead; not when they finally ended the charade that the hospital was functioning normally and shut off all the lights in the empty rooms; not when several teams of heavily armed men made their way out of every building on the block where they had been camping in case we decided to fight; not even when none of New York noticed my plight; not even  when the world kept on turning. 

Shuri

The world kept on turning; America didn't notice the injustice done by the UK on their own soil; New York's streets were just as bustling; the fake hospital's lights shut off; we flew off, invisible to the City below; our ship was silent, even the children held back their confusion and terror for her. T'Challa was slumped in his seat to my left, his face looking more aged than the last time he sat there, his normally positive and kingly posture suddenly that of a child again, I could imagine I looked even younger. The tears wouldn't stop cascading down my cheeks, an endless flood in her homage. My body felt wrong without her arms and wings wrapped around it, an animal without a skin, and to sit without her by my side was agony. I kept turning just to check that it wasn't some twisted nightmare only to find and empty cavern in my heart.

Maya

The doors of the lift opened with a metallic clunk after what seemed like hours but in reality was only a few minutes, these doors oiled far less often as the only people who passed through them were the dead and those who labored here deep into the night and day. It was not like in stories, there was no evil scientist, the only evil was intangible and yet always there ,an organisation.

The hallways here were not freshly painted, the doors not attempting to be anything other than they were, the next station on your way to the morgue. To my alarm, when we reached our destination, it was not the end of the line but a mere station on my way to putting someone in the morgue. We passed by the lines of glorified fridges of bodys that in death had become no more than a statistic, a blot on the page, past the large shute that went down to the incinerator. Why not just stick them in there? I had never seen in person the bodies of my parents when they died, there had been no space in the morgue, nothing to do but stick their empty coffins in the ground and burn what we had to ash as their family, I,   was sent nothing but photos to confirm it was them, a plain urn and condolences that they hadn't been able to get their bodies to England to be cremated. My uncle was the only one who could come to scatter the ashes with me and  he was a stranger, his house was declared unfit to keep a child in and so I had ended up in an orphanage with no hope of adoption. No one adopted a teenager, not when you would be out of the home in four years anyway. It only took me two.

On a painfully silver table, where the dead lay unmoving while they were butchered like bulls, there was an expensive looking mahogany box, lined with silken sheets of cream. A coffin. One of the guards, his suit distinctly less faded and the creases harsher, lifted the lid that hung over the side, the golden plaque on the front etched with the harsh midnight letters of mourning. What it read, as clear as day, sent shivers down my spine...

Maya Nelson. Me.

The information barely registers in my mind before my restraints are being united as roughly as they were fastened, releasing my sweating figure from the confines of the gurney only to lead into a much worse fate. Swarms of repulsive hands gripped my emotionally broken form as I screamed like a banshee. I had imagined a cage, barred in like the animal they saw me as but this was something that no 16 year old kid could imagine the horror of.

They were going to put me in that coffin and take me, blind and confined, to some location where they would experiment and train until I was no more use to them, then they'd chuck me out with the trash. I was as good as dead to them, I was useful, but dead, not human, not animal, dead. These thoughts assaulted my head just as my scream did to their ears. It was a scream of the helpless, the beyond scared, the petrified, animalistic like the mournful howl of the wolf to the full moon.  Hidden in the folds of the deceivingly uncomfortable silk were a set of four metal carabinas, attached by sturdy brackets to the very wood of the coffin, my coffin, complete with restraints.      

One of the men, this one with a scruffy beard and a broad chest, produced several pairs of handcuffs, causing my scream to increase in volume but remain distinctly fierce. A set was attached, too tight to be comfortable to each of my visible limbs, it was a miracle that they didn't discover my wings by accident, they were so rough with me that even when they did get a hand on the things they failed to notice, assuming it was a hand or a leg.

I was unceremoniously dumped into the coffin, my wings once again crushed, but this time I was fighting, it took four of them, one on each limb,  to attach the other end of each handcuff to the carabinas and the other seven had to assist them in jamming me into the space normally occupied by the unreluctant. When they finally managed to get all of me secured down into the box, my voice was hoarse from screaming, and the newest guard, aforementioned for his clothing, waved at me,his face contorted into a teasing smile. Then darkness reigned supreme. The lid had been slammed shut. My pointless screaming ceased , the black smothering my voice, there was a jolt as they lifted me, their deterring hands only separated by a feeble layer of wood.

I felt the slight differences in height, the lowering into the back of what I assumed was a car and all the while the tears silently flowed. It was probably a herse from the way that the coffin fitted perfectly in the back without jostling when it began to move abruptly.

As we wove our way through the streets of New York I began to sweat profusely, it wasn't a fever like the last few days, I felt like I would never leave this coffin. Time seemed irrelevant in this cramped confinement, they would bury me, let me suffocate, and leave me forever chained to the walls despite the fact that rigour mortis would restrict me better than any chain. I tugged at my shackles, like a slave in bondage who still held onto a shred of hope no matter how small a shred it be. Manipulating the damning metal, I managed to relieve my wings of the crushing weight of my frail body by shifting into a position on my side; this didn't help with the suffocating  feeling inside that overwhelmed me, outshone only by my love for Shuri. She was what kept me sane in that coffin, that hearse, those streets. Her name circulating my mind and shedding some semblance of light into the darkness. Her name kept my heart beating as I lay there, helpless as the day I was born, in the place of the dead, hyperventilation the only sound.

I must have passed out at some point, either from distress or the lack of oxygen in the confinement, because the next thing I knew I was high up, really high up, but the right kind of high up. A plane, I reasoned as the rushing winds cleared away the terror of what it is only natural to fear. I closed my eyes in an attempt to forget the feeling of the walls pressing against my feathered appendages with what felt like a thousand swarming beetles, I imagined what it would be like out there, were I was free, where no one could pin me down, ever. I wondered what it would be like to touch a cloud, to do what humans dreamed of for generations and only ever got to half experience. Time seemed to pass with speed as I imagined what it would be like to do what I had always dreamed of as a kid, to be able to be surrounded by nothing but air, to feel vulnerable and yet also immensely strong.  Before I knew it the altitude was dropping, and I was forced to open my eyes to reality and truth.

The plane set down with a bump that lead me to bang my head off the lid and disorientated my senses. Which way was up? Down? Where was the light? Where was sound? It took a few seconds to orientate myself and by then I was being lifted from the metal bird that could never make up for what the humans lacked. I listened intently, straining to gain a crumb of information that could help in anyway to solve my self induced plight. A light russel of something being draped over the coffin, like the sound of paper, or a flag in the wind. I had tuned my ears in so finely, beyond the capabilities of the humans, that the sound of trumpets assaulted my ears so fiercely that I was relieved that they didn't bleed. The Last Post? Recognised from years of remembrance parades at home.

Home.

They had brought me home.

In a coffin.

The sound had been a flag, but not in the wind.

The Union Flag, over my coffin.