Of Wax and Wings

Chapter 3

The last few months of Ikaros' senior year of high school flew by in a blur of time spent with his father and learning about all of the things he had had questions about that the school system had told him had no answers.

Daedalus, true to his word, had stayed near his son and near home, helping Ikaros with anything he wasn't sure of. In the copious amounts of free time they had together, they took up the practice of carving lumps of wax into ornate candles once again. Ikaros' favorite pastime, candle carving, had been something Daedalus had taught his son to do when he was a child, and Ikaros had latched onto the art and turned it into something he did on the daily. Their house was full of Ikaros' candles, and Daedalus refused to a single one of them, not willing to erase his son's beautiful, detailed, and handcrafted work.

The graduation stage, when Ikaros found himself walking across it, felt like a type of closure that, much like the sun and the blue sky, had seemed to be forever out of reach. The sea of his peers was mostly silent as he walked across the stage, but a few jeers and taunts rose out of the crowd. His father's voice, though, cheering for him, clapping, urging him on, was all that Ikaros could focus on, and a beaming smile spread across his face as he took his diploma from the principal of the school and shook his hand. He beamed at his father as he walked off the stage, and Daedalus stopped clapping long enough to give him a thumbs up. The man had tears on his face, and he was unabashedly and openly weeping with pride.

They didn't stay at the ceremony any longer than they had to, instead, Daedalus took Ikaros out to lunch. Sitting at the table together, waiting for their food to arrive, Daedalus leaned forward and propped his elbows on the table.

"Let's go down to Ilia," he said abruptly, watching Ikaros' face for his reaction.

The young man, not at all expecting his father's statement or what it implied, choked on his soda and nearly spit it on the table, coughing and spluttering until he managed to clear the fruity, carbonated liquid from his trachea. "Let's what?"

"Go down to Ilia," Daedalus said again, a lilt of amusement under his words at his son's response. "I know you've always wanted to, and now that you don't have school to worry about anymore, what's stopping us?"

"Dad, I'm not an architect. I can't carve stone. At most, I could make someone a bunch of candles or carve a house out of wax. I won't be able to help you with work." Ikaros looked down at the napkin on his lap and bit his lip, a tic that he'd developed as a child. "I'll be more useless there than I am here."

"Ikaros, listen to me. You aren't useless. You're just good at things that aren't what most people are good at. You know what that makes you? Special. You can do things other people can't. And because of who you are, you have a different view of society than most people. You can use that, son. Write a book. I've seen you write, and it's incredible. Tell a story, talk to people. Touch people's hearts. You aren't useless." Daedalus smiled at his son before looking down at his hands and taking a deep breath. "Besides, I wouldn't be taking you to the planet to help me with my work."

Ikaros furrowed his brows and he frowned, his eyes darting up from his lap to his father's face and back down again. "Then why would we be going," he asked, his voice small and uncertain.

"Because," Daedalus began, looking tired, like this was something he had gone without sleep thinking about. "I want you to meet your mother." Daedalus paused. "And your brother."

The decision to visit the continent below Parnaia was made extremely quickly, and after throwing some clothes and his toothbrush into a bag and sleeping through the night, Ikaros and Daedalus were leaving their house behind for however long they would be gone, the sun rising behind them as they walked several miles across their city. For Daedalus, it would be a few weeks. His job was to carve the details into the stone pillars his commissioner had selected for the building he and his partner had designed and built. He had been instructed to make the flowers seem random, though Daedalus was unsure of how well he would be able to do that, as he told Ikaros on the way to the cargo transports. It was a gorgeous morning, and the sun caught on the water molecules of the clouds, making everything sparkle.

Around his son, Daedalus kept his wings pressed flat to his back and concealed under his clothes. He'd told Ikaros that he did it because he hardly needed to fly, and that he liked to walk, but Ikaros was certain that his father's tendency had everything to do with his own lack of wings, and the fact that Daedalus didn't want Ikaros to feel alone played a large part in his decision. The young man could see the feathers of his father's wings as the wind picked up the bottom of Daedalus' pea coat and played with it like a toy.

The two men sat down at the back of one of the transport vessels, a roughly plane-shaped vehicle with almost impossibly small wings that hovered using the tension between air molecules. While neither of them could tell another person how it actually worked, Daedalus knew from years of taking the transports that they were safe and reliable. The transport vehicle shuddered as it pulled out of the hangar.

Ikaros found himself practically glued to the window, waiting for a glimpse of the rolling green expanse that was the planet below Parnaia. He didn't have to wait long, for the clouds soon fell away and the planet spread away from his eyes in every single direction in rolling hills and mountains of greys and vibrant greenish-blues. The stretches of vibrancy were broken up only by crystal expanses of water, snaking through the land in ribbons and splotches of blue of the same shade that found its home in Ikaros' eyes.

"Dad," he called over his shoulder to Daedalus, "Dad!"

Daedalus laughed, tipping his head backwards to look up at his son. "Yes, Ikaros?"

"Is this what a planet looks like? It's so... It's huge!" The wonder in his voice rang clearly like the pealing of a bell, and it would be difficult for anyone who knew Ikaros as the quiet, introverted boy who spent his lunches reading by himself in the library to recognize the excited, bouncing young adult that knelt on the bench and wriggled his toes in his shoes as the same person. Ikaros was plastered to the window, his hands on either side of the pane of glass as he stared out at the world that was slowly approaching him. Or... I guess I'm approaching it, he thought. The tip of his nose was touching the frigid glass, and his breaths made a small patch of fog on the window with every exhale, growing slightly smaller with each breath Ikaros took in. If he pressed his face all the way against the window, the world looked more flat, but if he pulled away, he could see the sharp curvature of the horizon like he could from Parnaia.

It took them almost an hour to reach the port on the planet, but to Ikaros, the time felt infinitely shorter, like the time he has spent staring out of the window as the details of the landscape became more and more visible had been infinitesimally short. When the vibrations that signaled the landing of the vehicle began again, and Ikaros could see the bricks that the building was constructed from as they blocked his view of nature, the boy peeled himself from the window and sat down next to his father, still bouncing excitedly.

Daedalus chuckled at his son's excitability, remembering when Ikaros was small and almost anything would excite him the way seeing the planet from below the clouds for the first time just had. "Are you still unsure about spending time down here?"

The most animated Daedalus had seen him be in years, Ikaros shook his head vehemently. "Definitely not. I want to go and look at everything!"

Daedalus laughed, wrapping an arm around Ikaros' shoulders. "Good. There's a whole world down here for you to explore, my son. I want you to see all of it."