Chapter Text
Going out to the windmills every now and again had become a thing they did every so often, a rare occasion. When one of them wanted some reassurance, mostly Rakka, or when they just wanted to take a small little break to stay silent in the field of wind mills.
Today was one of the days they went there to stop and think. The first time since Kuu left. Since Reki stopped Rakka from cutting her wings. They didn’t talk about it much after that, they kept mostly silent on the walk to those fields and in the hours they spent with their backs on the wind mill.
It was night, now. The sun had set past the walls, blue twilight settling in and turning the sky dark with the exception of the stars just visible enough through the clouds that gathered in the air. It was a new moon, tonight, and the absence of any moon let the stars come out in full shine.
They’d been laying there for a long while now. Still awake, somehow, just sitting and breathing as they stared out and thought. Reki’s thoughts were a little clouded, messy, but Rakka helped anchor her thoughts and emotions just enough that she didn’t sink into negativity. Even just thinking about her felt like it had that effect, some times.
Reki did want to talk about something to her, but she felt scared of what could come out of that conversation. Maybe she could test it out, maybe, just ask her. Rakka could handle it, she was sure, but talking to her about it just after what she did, felt so wrong, felt so selfish.
. . .
Maybe they should have started getting up, soon. Her legs and the rest of her mind didn’t want to cooperate, though. A small mutter and sigh came from her, a little imperceptible call to Rakka that wasn’t heard or fully noticed. Her voice raised a bit more from the whisper it was in. “Rakka?”
“…Are we going?” Rakka’s voice was smaller today, more quiet than she usually was. Reki turned her head to the other girl, her mouth opening and taking a second to decide which words came from her mouth.
More than a second. It felt like she was delaying what she wanted to say for a minute, even though she knew it couldn’t have been that long. Like there was a barrier of shame preventing her from speaking that she had to slowly crawl over.
“No. I just wanted to talk to you. About…”
Her eyes settled on Rakka’s wings. Even if she’d stopped her so early, it felt horrible seeing them that way, feathers cut blunt. The feathers regrowth was fairly quick, at least, they’d be back to their normal shape in a few weeks and it’d be like they never even got cut, because one’s wings never got scarred physically like that unless the damage was extreme, as far as she knew.
The black splotches were still there. Still real. Maybe they weren’t induced from physical harm, but they were scars to her regardless. Like the scars and marks along Reki’s arm, just on a separate part of the body and just a horrible discoloration instead of tissue grown over damage.
“… Something about myself.”
Rakka scooched a little closer, her head tilting up to Reki to focus on her eyes. All of a sudden, she was terrified to say anything again, and she had to rip through another barrier of her own shame and fear. Her voice forced its way out of her throat again.
“I used to… my arms, my legs, I used to…” She couldn’t speak it out fully as much as she tried to force her mouth to. Her brain tried to focus again.
“I stopped cutting my wings long ago, but I only stopped…” Reki paused for a moment, reading Rakka’s expression like she was searching for a sign that Rakka didn’t want to listen. Her voice started back up.
“Cutting my body, a few months before you came here.” Rakka’s expression changed. A sad, maybe a little shocked look that bore into Reki and almost made her feel weaker. Suddenly, she wished she just didn’t say anything again. But, it was already too late, and she’d spoken.
Even if calling out to God hadn’t really helped her at all over her years here, she wanted to call out to Him again, and pray that this moment would suddenly get skipped over and not be remembered by either of them.
“Can I…” Rakka spoke up eventually. Maybe it was immediately after she had spoken, maybe it was a few minutes after, Reki couldn’t even tell and didn’t even want to think about it.
“See, um. See your arm?” Reki shook a little, and turned her head around in a feeling of immense shame and embarrassment. It felt horribly wrong displaying emotions like these around Rakka, telling her about these things she used to do.
Yet, even though she kept silent and kept her head aimed at the ground or anywhere that wasn’t the younger haibane’s direction, Reki’s arm raised up towards Rakka slowly and cautiously.
Her other arm came up and guided itself to the sleeve of her jacket, and slowly moved it down. She’d worn short sleeve things around her before, but she never tried to draw attention to her arms and always tried to hide their undersides and bits of discoloration. Maybe moving her sleeve down was faster than what it felt like, maybe it was slower, and maybe this was just a dream she was having that she was just about to wake up from.
Rakka’s hand gently went around her own outstretched one, grabbing weakly and weaving around her fingers. This was wrong. To have someone else staring at her arms like this, to have even said all this, to have even shown her this. It felt horrible, yet, here she was, going along with it.
“Why?” Rakka’s soft voice had pierced her thoughts again. There were so many things that she could have said in response, and all those responses swarmed around in her head like storm winds. It was such a simple question and yet she found herself nearly locking up at every action she’d been taking and every thought she’d been thinking.
“I… didn’t hatch like this. And I didn’t always look like this.” Another short pause, another moment spent nearly locking herself into her own thoughts or passing out right there. If she didn’t say anything now, she’d just bottle it up forever, and that’d probably end up worse. “Like a girl, I mean.”
Getting this stuff off her chest to someone else, being able to speak it to someone else, saying it to her. It all felt wrong even though she was sure it wasn’t really an issue, and it made her feel like she was tensed up and ready to run like her life was being threatened. Her thoughts were trying to drag her into nothing again, and she just kept pushing them back.
“It's… It's hard to talk about it exactly. I’ve always felt like you did, out of place and wrong and undeserving of any love, and some days I just resorted to finding anything to cull the thoughts and clear my mind, and…” Her fingers tightened into a ball. Rakka’s hand tightened back and kept her fingers laced around her own. “…One day I started just hunting for ways to injure myself.”
Maybe the thoughts of ‘fight or flight’ were alleviating as she spoke. Reki, really, couldn’t tell. She tried not to think about her issues a lot for a reason, because it always made her feel like this, always made her spiral out of control, but her hands kept grabbing Rakka’s and maybe it was just enough to tether her down to keep talking for just a bit.
She didn’t cry. That wasn’t something she did. Even though her eyes wanted to, they watered and her vision got blurry, she held it back by blinking or shutting her eyes and hoping the tears wouldn’t break it ways out on its own. Her head turned around to face Rakka, not wanting to avoid her gaze more.
“It was one of my worst mistakes.” Of too many to count. “I’ll never do it again.” Reki’s hands tightened just a bit more around Rakka’s. The other girl was staring up at her, intent on listening and focusing, her focus never going down to Reki’s arm. Her own eyes tried to not look too far down at her outstretched arm, the leftover markings and tissue that dotted it.
“I… get it.” A short pause from the younger haibane. “Um, kinda.” Another hand of Rakka slowly settled on her elbow, gentle and a little cautious. “Sometimes things feel like that, for me. Like I’m flawed. Sometimes I just want to get the flaws out anyway, and…” She trailed off before she could finish, but Reki understood it more than enough.
“It’s fine to feel like that about yourself. Sometimes, you’ll just feel horrible for no reason at all. It’s never really permanent, and you’ll always bounce back.” Her gaze went down cautiously at her own arm, just for a few seconds.
Some scars had healed better than others, thin and off colored stretches that barely popped up. Some, the deeper ones, had healed worse, large white splotches and darkened marks on her skin where she’d burned things into it. The deepest, the worst ones, were red and angry bumps.
Reki’s eyes shot back up again, right to Rakka’s, whose head had turned to stare down at her arm again. The girl's hold on her hand tightened, so did the hand she had on her elbow, gentle but still firm. She wanted to stay holding her hand for a while. Maybe until the sun rose again.
. . .
“I think your arms are beautiful, Reki.”
Reki’s eyes slowly went up, moving to stare at Rakka’s wings. Her feathers were cut blunt, the blackened splotches visible. They looked beautiful, even still.
“So are your wings, Rakka.”
A nagging thought still bit at her. That this was all a lie and she still wasn’t cared for, that this feeling she always had really was permanent and she was unfixable. The one that always came back, like her distant dream she never recalled. She dug it down again, like she always did, and she prayed to God again that this was real and would last just for a bit longer.
They did go, eventually. As they always had to. The hammer was still in the grass, like it was trying to call out to her to just start over again. She hoped it’d just stay there and rot and that she’d never pick it up again.