(no subject)

[espigeonage]

Julien had been feeling unwell for a couple of days. He'd spent all of yesterday in, doing nothing much but sleep and eat, feeling hungry almost constantly. Putting away the detritus left behind by that seemed unusually difficult. He had to leave some wrappers where they lay, and couldn't focus to cook, and that thing kept happening, where it was like he couldn't remember how to move his face, and somehow his resting expression was a Mona Lisa look.

He'd wanted to think he was just sick. It didn't happen much at all, his body wasn't used to it. But on some level, he knew. It was in the occasional paralysis of his face, and the thick warm feeling in his sternum, and the way both his hips clicked when he stood up.

So in a way it wasn't a surprise when he woke and that feeling was pressing out, hot and throbbing and painful, getting worse as he pressed his wing against his chest. It was a surprise when he tried to get up, and fell. He'd wanted, when he thought about this day coming, to do it alone, but he couldn't manage to heat water or pick athelas. It hurt. Eventually he couldn't take it. He had to call for help.

Comments

[espigeonage]

Weeping, Julien makes a noise half like a child's whine, half a wail. There just isn't a more articulate answer he can give. Far away it seems, he lets his curled feet tuck and droop, then kicks up again as they encounter the alien softness of the feathers on his underside. He closes his eyes, inner lids then outer. He has to try twice, his lower eyelid suddenly becoming larger and mobile.

Feathers, spiky and hard-shafted at first but unraveling into slick softness, insert themselves between his face and Aaron's hands. His nostrils become a fuzzy-textured, vaguely heart-shaped operculum perched atop his beak. The structure of his skull rearranges. Matured feathers smooth out the look of his face. It doesn't look like anything else is happening, and there isn't much that could, but his eyes are still closed.

Julien's eyes are huge, far larger than what shows, but his head is quite removed from that of any pigeon stumbled across now. Wider across, with proportionally smaller eyes with a more forwards set and a far larger skull. The dye he'd used stays, somehow, and some of the feathers on his head are longer than the others. That doesn't mean he looks at all the same.

[elfstoned]

He won't impede the feathers. Aaron doesn't take his hands away, but he will pick them up and put them back, stroking along the feathers, not against them, brushing tears away. He murmurs to Julien the entire time, like you would to a child: shhh, be still, I'm here, breathe. There are snatches of song in it: healing hymns in the high tongue, a dialect Julien won't know. The impressions he gets are of trees made of light and starlight on a great sea. There's something in there about a heaven-queen, too.

No one here will rush Julien to open his eyes. Let him take it at his own pace. He may never be entirely ready, but far be it from Aaron to hurry him. There is time. He will stay bent over Julien, all but cradling his head, for as long as it takes.