Of Wax and Wings

Chapter 1

"Aviattes have wings, humans don't. Simple as that, you freak," The bully said as they thrust out their arms. A loud thud echoed through the hallway as the body of a young man slammed against the lockers. A smaller thud came from the young man collapsing on the floor. "You don't have wings, but you think that you're one of us. Let's get one thing straight," the bully sneered, kicking the young man in the side as their wings spread menacingly from their back. "You will never be one of us."

Leaving the boy groaning in pain on the floor, the bully walked away with their head thrown back, laughing loudly in such a way that it reverberated down the hallway and shook the glass in all the classroom doors. The young man, Ikaros Levitz, picked himself up off of the floor with another groan, pressing a hand to his side. Certain a bruise was going to form, Ikaros straightened his shirt and started down the long hallway. The soft soles of his sneakers made quiet taps on the linoleum floors that echoed off the walls, his steps producing an irregular staccato as he limped down the hall.

After exiting the school from a side door out of the line of sight of the main entrance, hobbling off across the massive expanse of cloud between the back of the school and the backyards of the grand houses nearby. The young man turned down the street and walked along the back fences of the yards of people living closer to the school than he did. He trudged up the bridge that connected the largest Parnaian cloud to the smallest, walking along the backs of the workshops of Craftsmen and artisans.  As the houses started to get smaller and the lots around them began to decrease in size, Ikaros jumped one of the fences, the brown pickets catching on his backpack.

The back of Ikaros' house looked much like the front of it, painted a dark green with white shutters flanking either side of all of the windows on the house. The clouds under the young man's feet were as solid as they had ever been, with small wisps of condensed water reaching and curling up around his sneakers, jumping away from his feet with ever step he took as if they had been hit. Stepping up onto the splintering wood of his porch steps, he crossed the darkly stained boards to his back door. Yanking open the screen door and wincing as it swung back and harshly hit his shoulder, which he knew was more than likely bruised from the whaling that several of his countless bullies had administered to it on more than one occasion that week.

His keys rattled metallically as he produced them from his pocket, all but dragging them from the denim of his skinny jeans. He could feel blood on his leg as he unlocked the door, and for that reason he was thankful that his jeans were dark. His light colored shirt, on the other hand, had splatters of blood on it from the split lip that had been given to him the day before that had split itself open again when Ikaros was slammed against the locker and punched.

The back door swung open slowly, the key grating against the inside of the lock as Ikaros pulled the jagged piece of metal free from the tumblers. The inside of his house was dark; his father wasn't home yet. Not that the young man had expected his father to be home, since the older man's job often took him to the Terran surface of the planet for long stretches of time. Ikaros found himself sighing heavily, dropping his satchel against the wall with a loud thump. Not bothering to turn on the lights, Ikaros stumbled down the dark hallway of his house and pulled open the folding door of the hall closet. He rummaged around for the first aid kit, carrying it with him to the bathroom and setting in on the sink before flicking on the light.

His own face was a shocking and a sore sight, puffed up far beyond what was normal. The left side of his face was especially swollen, and a dark bruise wrapped around his eye like the comforting arms of an old friend. His lip was busted open and there was blood running down his chin from his lip and his nose. Bruises littered his arms, and when Ikaros peeled off his tee shirt and threw it angrily at the laundry bin in the corner of the room, he could see that further bruises wrapped around his body, unpatterned, sprouting at random like patches of flowers cropping up in a field. Flowers of blood under his skin, the bruises caught his eye and made him bristle. Bitter agony and anger welled up in the pit of his stomach, and his pale knuckles steadily drained of any pigment they had, becoming ghostly white as his back and neck arch downward, his white hair hiding his face.

Turning to kick his shoes off of his feet, he flinched at the sound of the rubber bottoms hitting and making violent contact with the wall. Parallel to the mirror, he could see his back and the protruding bumps that made their home under his skin. Just above his shoulder blades, the bumps that humans wouldn't have on their bodies were the painful reminder of exactly what it was that made Ikaros different. The sight of the bone growths where his wings should have been made him simultaneously miserable and bitter, and the mere sight of them made him bristle with anger. Clenching his fists so the the mirror would remain in one piece of reflective glass and not in thousands of shards on the floor like he wanted it to, Ikaros instead looked down at his legs, gritting his teeth and drawing his brows close to his eyes. A myriad of colors, in purples and yellows, ran up and down his legs from various fights and run-ins with bullies.

He sat down on the edge of the tub, staring at the tiled floor, his bloodied fingers hovering in the lower periphery of his vision. The smell of copper filled his nostrils like the bathroom was filled with heaps of pennies.

He didn't cry. He reached over his shoulder and turned on the shower, peeling off his jeans as the water warmed up. Still wearing his boxers, he crawled into the tub and wrapped his arms around his drawn up knees, feeling the scalding water pounding against his skin and washing away the events of day. Only in the shower would Ikaros cry, where the drain would swallow up his tears. He scrubbed away the blood from his face and hands, working shampoo into his hair to get the blood from it as well. Once he was satisfied that he was physically clean, if not emotionally, he turned off the water and pulled himself out of the shower, managing to strip off the soaking boxers that were clinging to his body. Toweling himself off, he left all of the things he'd thrown off in the bathroom exactly where they had fallen.

Refusing to turn on the lights in the house, Ikaros felt his way down the hall on instinct and memory, turning into his bedroom and blindly pulling on pajama pants. Not caring that it was hardly even four in the afternoon, Ikaros made sure his thick and dark curtains were pulled tight before crawling into bed with his cell phone, unlocking the device to call his father.

The line rang and rang, and just as Ikaros was about to hang up and throw his phone across the room, the call connected, and his father's voice came from the speakers like a soothing cloud of comforting memories.

"Ikaros?"

Ikaros' breath hitched when he heard Daedalus call his name. "Dad?"

"Hey there, Squawks." Daedalus paused, listening to his son's ragged breathing. "It happened again, didn't it, Ikaros?"

Though he knew his father couldn't see him, Ikaros found himself nodding against his pillow. He mumbled some vaguely affirmative string of syllables, then buried his face in his blanket. Daedalus sighed heavily, his heart reaching for his child across the thousands of miles that laid between them. He knew that his son hadn't called to talk, rather just to hear his father's voice.

So, Daedalus began to talk. He told his son about the humans he'd met on this trip, and how kind and hospitable they had been to the Craftsman. His most recent project had been a distyle in antis building, and around each of the two columns, the owner had wanted carved rose blossoms. "The building," Daedalus recalled, "is going to be a small library that's mostly for a tenant of the estate, who was hired to teach the owner's daughter about plants. She isn't married, and she has one, very young son who's just about to turn seven. I think they're going to be living there for a long time. She's a botanist and has a greenhouse nearby on the estate grounds. The commissioner had asked for the roses to appear to be randomly placed on the columns," the Aviatte told his son through the static of their phone call, "But he also wanted different roses to be in different stages of life, from buds to curled-up flowers," Ikaros snorted, and Daedalus laughed with him. "I'm no botanist, Squawks," the father chuckled. "I don't know flowers. Anyway, he wanted fully bloomed roses and dying roses, and sculpting them is going to be interesting."

Ikaros murmured in response, whatever he was trying to say getting lost in his pillow, his breathing evening out as he laid sprawled on his bed, listening to his father's voice.