Re: The Icarus/The Fallen
It was a good thing, because Nathaniel wasn’t used to being thought disturbing. Glorious, yes. Awesome, and not in the colloquial reduction of ‘awesome’ so that it was on par with ‘pretty neat’. (Was there anything left that man couldn’t ruin?) Awe-inspiring then, when men had seen the span of his wings, felt the maelstrom of air in his wake as it buffeted their faces and made their eyes tear. He’d been great, and terrible, and merciful, and cruel.
But that’d been before the night came, and he’d tumbled down to Earth. It wasn’t his first visit, mind - but he’d always had a purpose here. Painted with the illusion of a man, he was used to slipping unnoticed through a crowd, not having space made for him. Being accommodated. Seen. It was foreign, the way that the player on the bench slid over for him, like the way that his shoulders felt strangely light without his wings. It wasn’t like he’d usually gone walking around with them in full display and all their grandeur, granted. But this time they weren’t just made invisible to human eyes that didn’t truly want to see. They were gone. He felt limbless and humiliated, a plucked hen. Certain that if he looked over his shoulder into a mirror, he’d see red gore dripping through the linen of his shirt between his shoulder blades.
But there were no mirrors in the piano car, and better things to look at besides. The instrument was lovely, and the man who played here was - well, he was a man. And so too, now, was Nathaniel. A man through a man’s eyes. Was the man striking? Nathaniel wasn’t sure. Beautiful? Ugly? Cruel? He felt lost. Adrift on their seat in front of the piano, while the man’s fingers danced like seafoam lapping at salt-bleached driftwood. He couldn’t tell if the music was sad. The man smelled of something vaguely familiar, an itch in the back of Nathaniel’s mind that he couldn’t quite reach. Nathaniel smelled like ozone. Summer air just before a thunderstorm.
He startled when the player motioned to him, and again when his hands moved of their own accord. The song that he started to play was sad, he knew that much. Sad in a melancholy sort of way, like it couldn’t be bothered to ring truly tragic, or swell heartbreak. Nathaniel wasn’t sure if he had a heart, to know heartbreak. Did he have a soul? His fingers twitched like they were looped through a puppeteer’s strings, and his elbow brushed against the other man’s side.
“Sorry,” he murmured, and his voice was broken chunks of gravel. Unrefined, unused. Unknown.