“Your first task is: Get on top of this box without climbing.” Seeker Sunny-Plume demonstrated, only taking a few wingbeats to propel itself about two feet or so up to the top of the wooden crate from a standing hop. After a moment, it jumped back down and eyed Maggie intently. “Now you try. Do not overthink it, and do not worry about succeeding. I just want to see your first instincts to know where you are starting from.”
“Too late for that,” the myna grumbled, trying to picture how Ink-Talon seemed to manage it. By his own admission, he’d “cheated” to figure out how to fly, and he was honestly a terrible teacher, but his clean and precise movements were absolutely what she should be focusing on here. She spread her wings, stared at the edge of the box, and crouched low. Jump and flap at the same time, then just keep flapping. She pushed herself upward and flapped down as hard as she could…
…And went precisely nowhere. She barely cleared the height of an unassisted hop, and her talons touched the dirt before she’d even finished the wingbeat.
“Oh, come on!” She tried again, this time only succeeding in sending herself backwards rather than upwards, falling onto her back. “Really? That’s the way you’re gonna send me?” She glared at the splayed limb to her left, arguing with her wings like they weren’t under her complete control. “Up! Push me up!”
“Pearl!” A loud kree! sound from Sunny cut through her frustration like a sharpened blade. It was a far harsher sound than it normally made: raw, high-pitched, and alarming. Given the way the kestrel cringed out of embarrassment after making it, she could tell that this was something it normally tried to keep out of its vocal repertoire. It quickly regained its composure and resumed its softer whistles and chirps. “Stop. I have an idea of what’s wrong. Can you stand?”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” Maggie folded her wings in and rolled onto her feet. “Is it serious? That sounded serious.”
“No. I was…” Sunny-Plume shook its head. “It is not important. This is. Can you extend a wing for me?”
“Okay.” Maggie wasn’t going to pry, but she couldn’t help but be curious. Every other animal she had met simply worked with whatever sounds they had available to them. But now she got the distinct impression that Sunny had been restraining itself this entire time, and was ashamed that it hadn’t for a moment. Why? “Like this?” Maggie unfurled her right wing.
“All the way, please.”
“...Sunny, this is all the way. It won’t go any faaaaaaAAAA-” Maggie’s voice slurred into a startled screech as Sunny-Plume walked up behind her, firmly grasped part of her wing in its beak and pulled. She felt bones and tendons she didn’t even realize she had shift painlessly as a whole extra third of her wing unfolded, with the longest feathers on her wing now fanning out in a more complete arc. She couldn’t help but stare at it in awe. “Holy shit.”
“Sorry! Did I hurt you?” Sunny dropped her wing, and the newly discovered joint immediately fell limp, prompting her to fold it back up. “It was just immediately obvious that you were only partly extending your wings, and showing you felt like it would be much faster than trying to explain it.”
“No, it’s just…” The myna struggled to find the words. As absurd as it was, this discovery threatened to upend the small amount of stability she’d been able to maintain with regards to her body. “I have wrists.” She was sure that the statement was silly to Sunny. She didn’t care. “I still have wrists.”
She let herself plop down on the dusty road with a muffled thud while her wings unfold and hang loose at her sides. At first, they remained stuck in that “default” position, but she focused on the tendons and muscles she briefly felt move when Sunny pulled her wing. She managed to get them to twitch, just a little bit, and then a few seconds later she began to extend it all the way, albeit at an incredibly slow pace. It was like she had suddenly sprouted a new pair of limbs on the spot. Her brain didn’t know what to do with them. She knew that this was a fantastic discovery, and that she should be happy that she could finally make progress. But all it did was piss her off.
“All this time, I had fucking wrists, and I couldn’t even feel them!”
“I… do not understand.” Sunny-Plume sat down next to her, momentarily moving its wing as if to place it over her, but withdrawing it after taking a moment to reconsider. “But I would like to. Are you willing to talk about it?”
“Okay.” Maggie took a deep breath, a proper, bird-like breath, and turned to meet the kestrel’s gaze. “I’ll try. I’d like you to understand, too. But I can’t promise that you will.”
“Of course.”
“So… When I first woke up like this, I was all alone. It was a whole two days before I happened across a village of other… people.” Maggie tensed up for a moment as she almost used “dehumanizing” language again. Sunny simply nodded, acknowledging but unbothered by the slip. “During that time, and for a few days afterwards, if I’m being honest, I was convinced I was dreaming. That none of this was real. That I was trapped in some kind of flawed simulation of reality. And part of the reason I decided that was… just how messy and broken the connection between my mind and body was. In order to move anything, I had to imagine moving an equivalent part of my old, human body. To raise my wing, I had to pretend I was raising my ‘real’ arm. To flex my talons, I had to curl my toes. To open my beak, I had to part my lips. But a bunch of it was messed up. It had to be my lips to open my beak. The far more intuitive jaw ‘muscle’ didn’t work. Turning my neck to look behind me required trying to turn my ‘waist,’ despite my bird hips not remotely moving in the motion and my human muscle memory knowing perfectly well how to move a neck.”
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
“I am sorry you had to go through that,” Sunny cooed, clearly unsure of how it should respond. Even a simple platitude like that was plenty, though.
“My hands were the last straw.” Maggie continued. “I could barely move my wings at first. My shoulders did the expected thing, albeit with a very different range of motion, but my elbows went nowhere.” She re-folded and then shifted her wing with just her shoulder to demonstrate. “And it was my ‘wrist’ that moved this joint, after the shoulder.” The next joint in her wing flexed, what she now realized was the bird equivalent of the elbow. “And then my fingers moved this…”
This was the dumbest part, and demonstrating it would be best. She imagined spreading out the fingers on a human hand, and her tail feathers fanned out. Pretending to flex her grip just angled the tail up and down or side to side, depending on what combination of fingers she focused on. She tried to ignore the uncomfortable, alien sensation that came with imagining her old body. She couldn’t.
“Do you have any idea how stupid this is? My fingers were fully opposable digits on the end of my arms, and yet things got crossed to attach them to my tail feathers! How could I possibly think that any of this was real? I gave up on trying to make sense of it way too early.” Maggie turned to look at Sunny-Plume, desperate for some kind of comprehension of her utterly incomprehensible scenario. “I was enough of an idiot to think I was just a bird with short wings and that birds didn’t have wrist joints. I would have figured this out way faster if I hadn’t just… stopped trying. Or even just paid attention in biology classes as a kid. Maybe I’d already be flying, and I wouldn’t be such a burden.”
Maggie let herself go completely limp and fell to the side, emotionally exhausted, if not physically. However, she never hit the ground. Instead, she found herself propped up by Sunny’s extended wing as the kestrel stared at her with the last emotion the myna ever would have expected. It was admiration, without even a hint of pity.
“You’ve been dealing with that all this time?” The kestrel chirped in astonishment. “Without anyone to help you? Your movements have been far from natural, but outside of a few instincts and your wings, I’ve not seen you struggle.”
“I forced myself to re-learn the basics of movement by making myself ignore my human body image. I had to stop remembering it at inconvenient times.” Maggie murmured, letting herself lean into the Seeker’s wing. “I even started adding those silly struts and spins to my speech to try and wring some kind of fun out of this. At first, I figured the other humans had also needed to completely tear down and rebuild their self-image, but just spending a day with Ink-Talon and Quiet-Dream was enough to disprove that. For some reason, it was just me. By that point, though, there was no point in bringing it up. All it’d do is make people worry. But now…” Maggie tilted her head back to meet Sunny-Plume’s gaze. “Now when I close my eyes, I can barely remember how I was at all. I can only see myself as this stupid, awful bird. I think I broke something inside me, and I don’t think I can ever get it back.”
“Pearl.” Sunny whistled quietly. “You are the strongest person I have ever met. Anyone weaker would have given up entirely a long time ago, and to accomplish so much so fast... But you should not have to struggle in silence. Let me help you.”
“I just… You’re…” Maggie tried to say more, but stopped as she heard her words start to collapse into a mushy warble. She couldn’t keep up any semblance of composure anymore, and she refused to say any of what she really wanted to with anything other than her own voice. All she could do was shift to her left a few inches and bury her face in the feathers on Sunny’s shoulder. She felt the other bird flinch briefly, and felt its already rapid heartbeat pick up.
“I was too presumptive with the obstacle course. We need to start with low-impact wing exercises, first, I think. The kind that helped me strengthen disused muscles after recovering from a sprain. Do you think-”
“Sunny.” The myna nudged the kestrel with her beak, not even bothering to make a sound.. “No more. I’m done trying for the day. Talk about something else. Anything else.”
“Anything else…” Sunny tensed up, with whatever it was thinking of making it even more nervous. “Well, I… also have a problem. Feral members of my species are very quiet, usually. But when they do vocalize, it is often loud, and painful to many creatures with keen hearing, as it is meant to… It is meant to call to distant birds. So I am not supposed to make those sounds in polite company. I have never had trouble restraining myself, but recently…”
“Oh, so that was a mating call.” Maggie couldn’t help but chuckle, nearly driving Sunny-Plume into an anxious frenzy.
“Please do not take it the wrong way! I would never attempt- Our species are not even-”
“Sunny, you dork!” The myna only started laughing harder, sitting up and looking the panic-stricken Seeker in the eyes. “I already knew! You’ve been fawning over me for days! Did you really think you were being subtle?”
“...Yes.” The poor bird had puffed up to an almost comical degree, and very much looked like it wanted to bury its head in the dirt and never pull it out.
“Well, you weren’t. But it’s okay. I trust you.” Maggie laid her head back down on Sunny’s side, smoothing over its ruffled feathers with her beak. She realized that she would happily sit here, in the shade of this absurd obstacle course that she couldn’t even properly use yet, for the rest of the day. So long as its silly, bone-headed, wonderful creator was here to share in it. It had come clean to her, and cheered her up enough to speak properly. The least she could do was return the favor. “Besides, the feeling’s mutual.” She gave Sunny a literal peck on the cheek, or at least on what passed for one on a bird’s head, and its nervous trembling stopped. “We can try things out and see where it goes, if you want.”
“I… do want. To try.” Sunny’s response came out in broken, half-stunned squeaks. It had clearly not expected this outcome. “Trying is good.”
“And so are you, Pretty-Plume.” The pet name went over extremely well, even if Sunny didn’t get the alliteration, and both birds finally managed to relax at the same time. All the turmoil of their lives seemed to melt away, if only for that moment. The only thing Maggie was missing was the ability to smile. Somehow, that was okay.
Neither of them needed to.