Birds of a Fated Feather (Dick Grayson/Robin x OC) **OC VERSION**

Escape

Hello and welcome! Posting a little early today 'cause I woke up and remembered. Fair warning Wattpad has been like... not syncing some of the changes I make so if anything looks funky or is edited weird that's probably why.

CW: Torture-like stuff, blood, and pain in general

I'm in hell...

The sound of my own blood sliding down my back and dripping onto the cold, metal floor of my cell pounded in my ears like a painful heartbeat. I lay there, shivering, eyes wide and filled with tears.

I reached to my back and gently touched the two bloodied wounds that sat between my shoulder blades, where my beautiful pair of light copper feathered wings once graced my fair skin.

This was the ninth time they had cut them off.

Each time they grew back, they would slice my wings right back off for their experiments.

My wings grow back about every two months, and after one month (when my wingspan equates to my arm span and the tips of my wings are about a foot and a half above the top of my head), they become functional (at their fullest, my wings span twice my arm span, and they go to about four feet above my head).

You see, I'm not from Earth. I come from a planet thousands of light-years away called Cantikoomvia, the home planet of my species, the Malteave. We're a bird/humanoid-like species with wings and fangs. The shape, size, and color of our feathers depend on what breed of Malteave we are, much like the different types of birds on Earth. The most important thing about our species is that we love music. We have the ability to transform the sound energy from music into other kinds of energies. It's used mainly for healing, but it could be used for plenty of other things. We love to make music, listen to music, and dance to music. I was especially gifted at dancing; I put all the energy of the music into the movement—like I could feel the melodies coursing through my own bloodstream. I liked to turn the energy from the music into different colored lights as I danced. I loved dancing under the night skies in Cantikoomvia.

Cantikoomvia looks a lot like Earth, except Cantikoomvia has rings, like the planet the humans call Saturn, and five moons, each reflecting a different color of light. It also is a lot closer to our sun than Earth is to its sun. This just means we've adapted to higher temperatures, and we're far more susceptible to the cold. If we get exposed to temperatures freezing or below, it would be only a matter of hours until we die, and we're much more prone to cold burns than humans are.

Those thoughts aside, Cantikoomvia is beautiful. I often spent my lonely nights in this cold cage dreaming of being back home, laying on the teal, grassy grounds with my brothers and sister, laughing at one of our inside jokes.

A ghost of a smile graced my face at the faint memory I have of my family. I lost them when I was five. My dad worked as a cosmic explorer, so he had multiple exploration pods stored in his garage. On my fifth birthday, I asked my dad to take me to Earth. He had told so many stories about all the different species that inhabited Earth. One had specifically sparked my interest.

Humans.

My dad had spoken of their homes, food, and music. I was fascinated. I asked him to take me for my fifth birthday, but he declined, claiming I was "too young." I, on the other hand, saw no issue. I had dreamed of befriending a human. I felt so connected to humans—I knew it was my destiny to go to Earth. So, of course, I snuck out.

I hopped in one of my dad's older pods one night and set a course to Earth. It wasn't too hard, the Virtual Voyage Assistant, or ViVA, activated as soon as the doors closed. The first thing she always asks is "Where would you like to go today?". All I had to say was "Earth." I know. Very child-proof. Our species was fairly technologically advanced (with the exception of child locks, apparently), so the pods had teleportation abilities. They would teleport you to whatever galaxy you were trying to get to, then it would enter hyper-speed to whatever celestial body you were trying to reach.