It's not easy being winged... Who: Icarus & Husk What: An overdue sibling chat When: Friday morning. Where: Haven Warnings: TBD. Jay is a big fat grouch. You've been warned. Emotional anguish, moderately strong language.
Ever since the horrendous nightmare in which he was certain he had finally well and died, although not in the way he would have liked, Jay had felt even more prickly and jumpy than usual. He was not having any luck snapping out of his eternal funk, mainly because he didn't want to. Granted, waking up or, rather, coming back from the dead on the bottom of a lake with an aching, freshly healed hole in one's chest cavity to the sight of the love of your life drowned in your arms wasn't something anybody could easily bounce back from. And Joshua Guthrie did not intend to. He didn't want to bounce back or get better. The young man wanted to die and join his beloved Julia in heaven or hell or wherever people went when they died. He no longer cared which, so long as he could be with his love again. But the same mutant X-gene that gave him the wings that marked him as abnormal also punished him by giving him a healing factor. No matter how many times he tried, and he had tried plenty those first few months, Jay Guthrie was the boy who couldn't die.
Despairing for what to do, his mother Lucinda had sent him to the Haven, to be among others of his kind and to be closer to his big brother Sam. She wanted him to get better, but she had a truckload of other kids to raise, and could no longer handle dealing with a suicidal child on top of everything else. It had gotten to the point of the ridiculous, where Lucinda had to yell at Jay to at least take off his clothes when he tried all that foolishness, since she was the one trying to wash blood off of perfectly good clothes every other day. After seeing his strong mother in tears one time too many, Jay agreed to move to Xavier's estate, if only to spare his poor mom that kind of suffering.
He didn't blame Lucinda. Jay loved his mom very much, and he did feel selfish for wanting to die. He just couldn't help it. Jay had loved Julia since they were ten years old and didn't know their families hated each other. She had inspired a good portion of his songs over those tortured teenage years. She had inspired his best work to date, his farewell song to her, She lies with angels. But after he gave voice to his grief in that song, he stopped writing music altogether. He was blocked, and couldn't get past it. He could barely sing without bursting into tears, or his voice choking in his throat. It was as if Julia had taken his voice with her when she died. The girl had loved Jay's singing so, in his mind, it wasn't completely far fetched that she might have done just that.
Jay had spent the last six months or so mostly hiding in his room, and when he did leave, he hid his blood red wings under an ungainly coat or a blanket. Some might think he was hiding some grotesque hump under them or something of the kind. Truth was, he longed to fly. Jay had been voluntarily earthbound since Julia's death. It was one of the many ways he punished himself for surviving. Now, his body had reacted to the incredibly vivid and stressful dream by molting up a storm. Jay could swear he could make a whole bed out of red feathers by now. His wings itched like crazy, sometimes so much his eyes would tear up, and he had begun to pluck some of the more aggravating feathers himself, except the feathers he was shedding didn't itch nearly as much as the fresh new pins growing to take their place.
Unlike fully-developed feathers, the pin or blood feathers have a blood supply flowing through them, and in Jay's case they were double sensitive to touch. One time he had been so distressed he'd plucked the wrong feather, almost yanking out a pin by mistake. Jay had shrieked and literally fallen to his knees, writhing with pain and cursing the day he grew the stupid wings in the first place. He had also bled profusely, which could have been serious but for his healing factor.
As much as he claimed to hate his wings these days, a part of him felt intensely protective of them, especially after seeing himself with a pair of monstrous, unnatural metal wings in his vision of the future. The memory of his hard, cynical, ruthless future self with those cold, unfeeling wings gave him shudders and even nausea. If that was his future, blowing things up and hacking people to pieces with razor sharp wings, then he definitely didn't want it. It was probably the shock of the certainty of losing his wings in a violent fashion that had sent him into this sympathetic moulting.
In short, he was a mess. The itching and sensitivity wouldn't let him sleep, and then trying to groom the damn things was only embarrassing. Sensitivity cut both ways, and Jay was mortified to hear himself whimper and moan sometimes as he worked on the stupid wings, especially when he got to the smaller feathers, the coverts. And don't even get him started on the scapulars. He learned that, the closer they were to the area where the wings joined his body, the more sensitive they were to the touch. No wonder he had loved flying so much, he thought with a sense of shame, like he was some pervert for finding it so pleasurable. The wing cutting through his feathers at high speed must be the equivalent of having a deep tissue massage.
"Great," he grumbled to himself. "Now ah'm a freak AND a pervert. Momma would be so proud," he went on, hating his body's uncouth reaction to his brushing his fingers through his feathers to try and gently catch any more loose ones before they tangled and hurt.