#i put her collar around one of the stair bannisters and i gave her blankets to my friend for her dog

[tendertenebrosity]

Torin, awake

Sequel to here and here, and here!

Torin, who had been teetering forward at an increasingly precarious angle, slipped over to one side and awoke with a start.

“Hey,” Bertram said, from his seat in the lone armchair. He lifted a mug of hot cocoa. “Yours is over by the fire. Unless you want to go back to sleep in a real bed.”

Torin rubbed at his eyes and looked around, wincing and rubbing at his shoulderblades. “Oh. Thanks.”

He rearranged his legs and tail until he was sitting cross-legged, took a deep draught from the mug, and sighed contently. “Where, um, where are we, professor?”

“I’ve commandeered one of the university’s rooms,” Bertram said. “We’ll head back home in the morning.”

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, the room filled with the sound of the crackling fire and the occasional low rumble of thunder from outside.

Bertram cleared his throat. “Torin,” he said carefully, looking down into his cocoa. “Did… did somebody cut your wings? Before?”

Torin hunched his wings and his shoulders, looking embarrassed. His feathers were fluffed up and standing every which way. “Oh,” he said. His gaze dropped. “Sorry… about that. Don’t worry about it, professor. Being stupid. I wasn’t...” He scrubbed an awkward hand over his face.

“Okay,” Bertram said quickly. “You don’t have to talk about it. It’s okay, if you don’t want to.” His fingers fidgeted around the cup. “I just… you need to know that I would never, ever do that.”

Torin nodded, his face fixed on the fire. “Yeah,” he said, after a moment. “I… I didn’t… really think you would.”

“Right,” Bertram said uneasily. “Good. Great.”

They both sank into silence again, staring into the fire, Torin from the floor and Bertram from the armchair.

This time, it was Torin who cleared his throat, and turned around to look at Bertram. “Could… um… could you help me preen before I go back to sleep?” he asked. A bright little smile flashed across his face. “I feel so much better, being clean and dry, but – I sort of feel like I’ve been dragged through a couple of hedges backwards?”

Bertram eyed his feathers, puffed out and sticking out all over the place, quite unlike his usual sleek shine. The smooth sharp edges of his primaries were broken up.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said, matching Torin’s bantering tone, and was rewarded with another little smile. “Of course I’ll help.”

Torin hadn’t asked Bertram to do this very often. He felt… oddly privileged to be asked. And at the same time, faintly anxious and guilty.

Unlike bathing, Torin could do this himself, he didn’t need to ask Bertram to do it, but he was anyway. More than once, Bertram had wondered what he would need to do to win Torin’s trust. This was a gesture in that direction… but given that it was his fault Torin had gotten lost in the storm in the first place, Bertram was beginning to doubt if he’d earned it.

He put aside the dregs of his cocoa and slipped down off the chair, to sit on the floor in his borrowed, much-too-large clothing.

Gently he ran his fingers through the contour feathers putting the worst of the misaligned ones back into place. They were warm from the fire, dry and soft under his fingers, and he knew a moment of the same absolute, dizzying wonder that he had felt when he had seen Torin for the very first time, in the lobby of his lodging-place in Eastport. Breathless at the thought that such a miraculous creature could exist, could be here, could be touched by him.

Now, with his recent scare and the guilt still clinging to him, Bertram thought uneasily that Torin wouldn’t have liked it, if he knew Bertram’s thoughts. He probably hadn’t liked it even then, he realised.

“I’ll start here,” he offered, trying to break out of his moody thoughts. Focus. He asked for your help. Don’t start again.

“Mmm,” Torin agreed, fingers already working through his other wing.

They sat, Bertram’s brown head and Torin’s particoloured one both bent over their work.

Bertram sat back after a while, stretching his linked hands high over his head to ease his cramped back. He poured them both another cup of cocoa from the jug keeping warm by the fire.

“Darius did it,” Torin said, abruptly, but his voice very soft. “Because I flew away.”

It took Bertram a moment to figure out the connection, to realise that Torin was answering his question from earlier. He froze, the jug and cup in his hands, and then put them down slowly. “I see,” he said. “Because… you flew away.”

“Yeah. It took, um. Eight months for them to grow back.”

Bertram thought about that. Thought about Torin’s joy in flight, how he would vault over stair bannisters and leap up into the sky as easily as another young man might break into a run or boost himself over an obstacle with one hand. If one were used to flight, he thought, surely being deprived of it would be like… like having your legs hobbled? For eight months?

“That was cruel,” he said.

Torin glanced at him. “You think so?” he said, his voice low. “They didn’t. Either of them.”

“Sorry… either?”

“Darius and Alissa. You met her, once – she sold me to you.”

“Oh, right, of course.” Bertram had thought – the girl had said Torin was her friend. He’d thought Torin liked her? Wasn’t that the whole premise? He furrowed his brow. “I… wouldn’t have thought that of her,” he said slowly. “They shouldn’t have done that to you. I’m sorry.”

Torin shifted, seeming a little agitated. Bertram didn’t try to move closer and restart preening.

“Well, it made a lot of sense. From their perspective. Can’t have your property escaping, right?” He looked over and met Bertram’s eyes, his mouth twisting bitterly. “Don’t you think so?”

Bertram sucked a breath in between his teeth, suddenly feeling as though he was trying to make his way through quicksand.

Torin did this sometimes – like he was trying to press Bertram into saying or doing something harsh. Like the winged boy was certain that eventually Bertram would reach the limits of his patience and start acting like this Darius – God, Bertram was starting to despise the man - and he kept probing to try and find out where those limits were.

“No, Torin,” he said. “I don’t. I think it was wrong, and cruel.”

Torin shrugged moodily. “Maybe because you people don’t have any wings, they thought it shouldn’t be such a big deal to lose them. I could still walk, right? And, hey, it was only feathers, they grew back. So, no harm done.”

“I…” Bertram winced. “I... don’t know if I fully understand,” he admitted. He felt like he was trying to find a safe place to place his next footstep. “But you only have to listen to you to see that there was harm done.”

Torin sighed. His shoulders relaxed, and after a moment, Bertram offered him the cocoa mug. He accepted it. “They were okay a lot of the time,” he said. “Not like you. But okay. It was just work, I couldn’t leave but they treated me not that differently to the people they paid to be there. And Alissa was… I thought she was my friend. I don’t know. Maybe she was. I can’t tell anymore.”

“Hmm,” Bertram said, non-committal.

“Of course,” Torin said. “That was back in Eastport. I thought… I guess I thought I could find my way home from there. I thought I could remember the way.”  He shook his head. “I couldn’t, mind you. Besides, I didn’t even get out of sight of the city before someone caught me. Stupid bird, right?”

“No,” Bertram said. “You’re not… stupid. How long have you been away from home?”

“A couple of years, I guess?” Torin said. He glanced over at Bertram. Shyly, he stretched his wing out in invitation, and Bertram, feeling even less like he deserved it, smiled anyway and began to smooth long black flight feathers between his fingertips. Each had a perfect little oval of white in the centre.

“I was… only supposed to be going on a short trip, to visit my aunt and uncle. They probably all think I’m dead now.” Torin sank his head onto one hand, cupping his chin and looking into the fire.

“That’s awful,” Bertram whispered.

“I missed it all so much,” Torin admitted. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have risked flying away.” He gave a sad smile. “I still do. But, well, that was back in Eastport, which is completely different. Even I’m not dumb enough to think I could make my way home from here. It’s on the other side of the sea, even if I could figure out where to go after that.”

“Right,” Bertram said quietly. “You know, I... I really should have asked you more about your homeland. If you’d be interested in telling me about it, I’d love to listen.”

Torin nodded, and then smothered a sudden, huge yawn. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I’d like to talk about it more! Sometimes I worry I’ll forget things. Maybe once we get home?”

“Sure,” Bertram agreed.

Torin withdrew his wing, folding it gently back up against his body. “Thanks,” he said. He spoke in a rush. “For… for everything. You were right, I was an idiot. I should’ve known better, I was just mad. My parents or my auntie wouldn’t have stopped yelling at me for a solid month.”

“Well, I don’t have a winged person’s impressive lung capacity, so I would find that difficult,” Bertram said, grinning. He stretched again, rolling his shoulders. “Why don’t you take the bed, Torin? I’ll sleep in the chair.”

Torin blinked at him, and then grinned wickedly. “Are you sure? Aren’t you a bit old to be sleeping in chairs?”

Bertram spluttered. “Cheeky,” he said. “Anyway, we’ll see who feels like an old man in the morning, won’t we? I suspect you’re going to be sore enough as it is.”

Half an hour later, Torin was an indistinct lump under the blankets, but Bertram still sat up, watching the fire.

He was exhausted – tiredness dragged at his eyes and his limbs – but sleep was elusive. His mind wouldn’t stop turning over and over, trying to find a new angle to look at the situation and coming up with nothing except the conclusions he already had.

Are you really that different to this Darius fellow? he thought unhappily. You don’t put a collar on him or punish him, but you don’t need to. He can’t get home.

You brought him here.

Looking back at his past actions with the benefit of hindsight, Bertram knew what was wrong with the wonder that had come over him when he’d first seen Torin. Wonder, yes, nothing wrong with wonder, but… It had had a possessive edge to it.

He wants to go home. And he can’t. Because you took him across the sea.