Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The leaves whisper their secrets in his ear as he rushed through the air. The wind ruffles the red feathers behind his ear as falls. He smiles; the feeling of falling was intoxicating.

His feet hit a branch, and he launches himself off to the next tree.

The sun warms his face as he reaches a clearing in the trees; the sky is bright blue, cloudless. He pushes off the next branch, and the feathers on his arm catch his fall, shining until he is under the shade of the trees once more.

“Get your ass down here!”

Tommy rolls his eyes before jumping off the branch he was on and gliding down, Beau was waiting at the bottom of the tree for him. “You can’t run off like that, what would happen if you were seen? You’re a fucking idiot,” Beau chastizes.

“Don’t talk shit about me climbing trees, I know you sneak out to the village when you think I’m asleep.” Tommy retorts, rolling his eyes again as he walks past her.

“Yeah but I’m careful, you had your bright red feathers out for display, at least I hide mine.”

“You’re not hiding them now!”

Beau rolls her eyes before grabbing his arm and dragging him back to their camp. Although they argue, Beau was his best friend. She was the only other avian, the only other hybrid he had met. After the hybrid hunt decree ten years ago all hybrids went into hiding, now most of them were dead.

He had met Beau three years ago, she had run from him originally, scared that he was human, but he had seen her dark green feathers. He knew she was an avian like him, he knew that he needed to meet her.

After a lot of chasing he had finally caught up to her. She finally saw his bright red fathers behind his ears, his gliding feathers along his arms, and she wordlessly offered a piece of bread.

They had been together ever since.

They walked back to their cave. They had been staying here for a week, a week they lasted without being stumbled upon by innocent hikers. Some took sympathy on the too skinny kids, offering food before finding out they were avain hybrids, and by extension vegetarian.

Some ate the lies the government fed them and called the HRA: Hybrid Removal Agency. It was a nice way of saying they killed hybrids on sight.

“I started a farm,” Beau says, looking down at the ground.

They never talk about their past lives; their lives before the hybrid hunt decree, before the HRA, before everyone turned their backs on hybrids. Hybrids had served the ordinary human, then they turned their back on them. What Tommy did know from the scarce information they shared was that Beau used to live on a farm.

He also knows that whenever they stayed somewhere long enough where Beau would start to farm she would act weirder, more detached. Tommy knew the feeling, was more familiar with it than he preferred.

Tommy gave her a nod before she walked off humming; probably to tend to her farms. He walked further into the cave, for the week they have been there they left their mark. Tommy’s drawings were displayed on the cave walls, Beau’s scribbled lyrics left on pieces of papers scattered around their cave. Their only two blankets were in their each, respective corner. A single pillow lay on top of a cardboard platform. In the middle of their cave was a piece of a log they found, their table, with plates, bowls, and utensils Tommy carved himself.

He picked up a paintbrush and walked back to his abandoned artwork, his mom used to awe at his drawings, before he was ripped from her arms when the decree was first made. Before it was just him and his dad, then just him.

The picture he paints is a sad one, but a real one all the same.

The picture held the truth about the world, a sad, lonely avian, surrounded by once friends now enemies. His fathers clipped, his hands chained, crying tears of gold. Behind him were colorful, different shapes in patterns, ones that flowed smoothly until they got to the humans, where they turned ragged and rough and dripped red.

Painting the final touched, the highlights, the shadows, Beau walks in with a handful of seeds she has collected over their travels. “I was thinking about growing some pumpkin! If we find a lava pool we could make pumpkin pie,” Beau explains.

“I knew you were stupid, but I didn’t think you were dumb enough to go near a lava pool,” Tommy remarks, continuing his brush strokes.

“It’s just to cook it, besides, I won’t be too close. I haven’t had pumpkin pie since I was little.” She says with a small smile on her face, a sad one, then he remembered what today was, it was her birthday. Beau turned seventeen today.

Normally, they didn’t celebrate their birthdays, but Beau was getting her gliding feathers this year, and it was an avain custom to have someone’s favorite food on their gliding birthday.

Tommy tried to hide his sudden realization with a scoff, “fine but if you get killed I won’t feel bad,” Tommy says.

Beau laughs and says, “Come out to the garden with me.”

Tommy followed her out of the cave and down further until they reach the freshwater stream. She plants the pumpkin seeds she had in her pocket and placed the gray powder on top of the freshly overturned soil, bonemeal.

This was one of the reasons humans needed hybrids, they could harness magic humans wouldn’t have thought imaginable. Bonemeal was one of these magics, they made crops grow within seconds.

Humans had tried to copy hybrid techniques, but it never worked for them, they didn’t have the magic the hybrids did. But eventually, they didn’t need their magic anymore, their magic only made them more dangerous. They needed to get rid of every hybrid.

Tommy watched the stem of the plant sprout through the dirt, then grow taller. Leaves formed, flowers following quickly after. Soon a start of a pumpkin came to be, then it got bigger. Finally, the orange fruit was ready to be picked and taken back to their cave.

Beau took out a pair of pliers and cut the stem, a nostalgic look on her face before picking it up and taking it to the cave.

They set it down on their table and got to work.

In the end, they were both covered in pumpkin, but they had a triumphant smile and the beginnings of pumpkin pie. All they needed was to go to the lava pool they spotted on their journey to this cave and cook it.

The lava would cook it fast, they just needed to hold it over by a platform Tommy carved for ten minutes and the process would be complete. The sun starts to set when they finally get to the lava pool, they would have to make it back to the cave quickly. The HRA patrols during the night.

Tommy hides his anxiety behind the conversation, grateful to see a genuine smile grace Beau’s face, they had become rare since the hybrid genocide.

The sun had set completely by the time their pie was complete and they started their walk back to the cave. “You know, I hated pumpkin pie,” Beau says.

“Then why is that the food you chose?” Tommy questions.

“It was my mother’s favorite.” Beau rarely talked about her mother, her father left when she was little. The few times Beau talked about her she had mentioned what an amazing person she was. It was unfair she was murdered.

It was unfair so many innocent people were murdered.

Tommy decides to take the invitation and approach the subject, “What was she like?”

“She was amazing, the best cook in our entire village. Once a month she would have everyone over and cook for them, she would spend the entire day preparing for it. I remember my grandmother coming over to look after me so I wouldn’t bug her.

“And she was gorgeous, when she walked into a room everyone quieted down, you wouldn’t have to meet her to know that she was a very serious person. Even though she was, she was so creative. We would play together all the time, playing house, restaurant, whatever we felt like that day.

“Sometimes, at night, if I try hard enough I can still hear humming-” Beau stops talking.

Tommy looks to his side to see what was wrong, only to see her shocked face, the pumpkin pie she was holding drops and her hands go to her stomach. Tommy looks down, then does he realize the red stain spreading across her shirt, the arrow sticking out of her back. “Tommy?”

“There’s another one, I need backup,” The person shouted behind him. The sound of footsteps rushing away from him was droned out by Beau coughing. “Beau!”

Beau drops to the floor. “Beau! Beau, listen, there gone, for now, we’re going to get you back to the cave-”

“Tommy!” Beau shouts, Tommy is kneeling next to her, he pushes one hand to her wound and wraps the other around her shoulder.

“No, we can get you healed,” Tommy tries but Beau silences him.

“Tommy, there’s no fixing this, go before they come back,” Beau says with finality. She brings a blood-soaked hand up to his face and wipes away a tear, leaving a trace of blood on his cheek when had he started crying?

Tommy takes her hand presses it against his cheek, keeping the other hand behind her shoulder. “We’ve gotten out of tougher situations, come on, you haven’t even gotten all your feathers,” Tommy tries, silently pleading with the universe to not let this be her end.

She was a girl made of fire, she was supposed to go out in a flurry, a grand ending, burning everything down with her. She wasn’t supposed to go down this easily, she wasn’t made of glass.

Beau had tears in her eyes too, “Tommy stop, it will only lead them to you, you can’t take me back to the cave.”

“But, but we were supposed to live, we are survivors, right?”

Beau laughs weakly, “I was never meant to live, I was only merely cheating death.”

“That’s surviving all the same,” Tommy whispers.

Beau’s hand goes limp, “living and surviving arent the same, but Tommy, live for me,” She whispers before her entire body sinks into the earth,

They say when a magical being dies time slows, they have been living in slow motion since the genocide, but this was different. Time didn’t slow, it froze. Tommy hugged her body to him and he was frozen, he was frozen as the HRA approached behind him. His tears had stopped their tracks down his face, his hands stopped shaking.

The person behind him grabs his arm, but his hold on Beau doesn’t loosen. They take a gun, only the HRA had guns and pressed it to his head, then, he hesitated.

“Run, leave her body and run,” the man behind him said, finally time moved normally again, and he was able to look back.

The man had a smiling mask on, and his gun was clenched tightly in his hand. “Go before I change my mind,” So reluctantly, Tommy grabbed her body and ran, he ignored the man shouting. It wouldn’t be right to not give her the proper avian burial.

He doesn’t hear the man’s footsteps after him, avains had heightened hearing, but that didn’t make him slow. He needed to get somewhere safe and do the proper avain burial. The last time he did this he was thirteen, and he was burying his father.

He gets to his cave, ignores the trail of blood that would lead the HRA here, and sets down Beau’s body on the outside of the cave. He prepares the scraps of her songs, her favorite flowers, some pumpkin seeds, and finally one of his feathers.

You are supposed to have a feather of everyone who loved you, sadly, none of them were alive, so Tommy’s feather would have to do.

He places them all in a chest, and he takes them down the pond by the stream, he starts to dig.

Once it’s completed and the ground had been covered, Beau and her chest underneath, he starts the bone meal.

Avains had a connection with the earth, the forces that control nature, that was their magic. So when Tommy places the bone meal on top of the newly overturned dirt, when his tears reached the powder flowers started to grow.

The flowers that grow are based on memories, Beau’s favorite, or one she had a special connection to. These flowers that grew were small, tiny green that sprouted from the Earth, in between were taller, yellow flowers.

The green was from Tommy, the flowers reminding him of her whenever he passed by them. They looked tiny, sweet, harmless, but if you touched them your hand would start to itch, then burn, and by the time you got home your entire hand swelled up. It was much like Beau, so innocent and unassuming on the outside. But on the inside, a dark rage fueled her, one that was bound to swallow her, and everyone around her.

Tommy would never see her fire again, never see the way her eyes lit up at the idea of a challenge, her face would set in determination as she was faced with a new task. He would never hear her sing again, never listen to her hum him to sleep when the nightmares wouldn’t allow him to close his eyes. He would never see her smile again, He would never see her laugh again.

She would never get to know the freedom of gliding, she never had her pumpkin pie.

She never got to live.

The yellow flowers were from the first time they met. They had sat down on one of her blankets eating the bread she had offered. The yellow flowers surrounded them, butterflies fluttering around, pollinating. She had pointed out her favorite, he had picked one and gave it to her, to which she promptly responded, ‘I don’t want your fucking flower.’

He wonders if he could go back in time, would he not chase after her, would he stay on his own.

He knows he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t undo the years they spent together, the years where he memorized her laugh, where she would scribble notes down on his arm so she wouldn’t forget. He would trade anything to hear her annoying accent one last time. He would never undo the time they spent together, he knew the risk of getting close to someone, and he took it.

He lost in the end.

He grabbed a stone, and with his paint created a picture that depicted her perfectly.

There was a girl surrounded by dark, eyes the only visible facial feature, music notes, and color danced in her hands while she held them out, yet her eyes were angry. Tommy had captured the anger in them like whenever they were chased out of a new home. He put her birthday, and death day, along with her name.

Beau, a friend, a survivor, taken too soon,”

It didn’t capture the memories, the ones he would cherish, it was simply a placeholder before he could create something better.

Tommy wiped his tears and walked away from the grave.

This government had taken too much from him.

And he was willing to kill whoever it takes to get this torment to stop.

Chapter Text

Tommy couldn’t waste any more time grieving. He had to pick himself up and move on. He knows this, but something keeps his legs attached to the ground. Every logical part of his brain is screaming at him to get and keep moving, but his body won’t listen to reason. He stays planted there next to the green and yellow flowers. Part of him wanted to reach out and touch them, no matter how much he knew it would hurt.

But, Tommy couldn’t. He needed to live, he needed to live for Beau. He needed to live because she never got to. He will let her memory remain in everything he does, underlining it with a hint of sadness. Everything he will do will be for her. He will take down the HRA. He will let grant freedom to all the remaining hybrids. He will win. And it will be for her.

He can win tomorrow. Today he will sit in the soil, processing what had happened in the last 24 hours. He will hate every force on earth, including the one that spared him.

He would give his life in a heartbeat. It wasn’t a question, if he was given the choice to trade his life for hers, it would be yes. It would always and forever be yes.

No forces like that exist. There is no all-powerful being to take pity on the lowly hybrids. There is nothing above that was looking out for them; there was no divine entity protecting them. If there was, why would they let this happen? Hybrids had dutifully served humanity for thousands of years, what could they have possibly done to warrant such punishment? Why does Tommy have to pay the most horrible price for a crime he didn’t commit?

Tommy dwells on these thoughts, they grab onto his legs and cling to him, dragging him deeper and deeper under the water. Maybe once he would have fought against them. Yesterday he would have thrashed and tried to break free, but yesterday is not today and Beau was gone and Tommy let himself sink.

He will move later, he will live later. Right now, all he can see is her bloodied body, all he can taste was the blood that had gotten on his face, and all he could hear were his own screams.

Yes, Tommy would get his revenge on every last HRA agent, he will have them begging for mercy as he hunts them down. He will bring them inches from death, only to pull them back, and leave them that close again. He doesn’t care how sick it may make him sound, he doesn’t care how sadistic it may be. It isn’t half of what they deserve. They should consider the fate Tommy was planning for them mercy.

They took everything from him. Everyone he loved. They took innocent lives, the lives of children who would have never known the joy of gliding, and the lives of innocent hybrids who never know the joy of using their powers. They took Tommy’s soul, now he is an empty shell. A hollow body that only knows of hurt and anger. He has brief memories of his parents and brief memories of friends. All the meaning washed away when their blood was washed from his hands.

When Tommy finally got his revenge, there would be nothing more to live for. There would be nothing to tether him to this Earth. After he had righted the wrongs of so many people he could be free.

But Tommy was not free yet, and now he has a lot of work to do.

~

After spending the next couple of hours sitting next to Beaus' grave, he finally finds the strength to pull himself off the ground, collects all the shattered pieces of himself, and starts walking. He doesn’t have a destination in mind, he just needs to find a place with a ceiling over his head where he can formulate his plan.

He leaves the tombstone behind, the only things he has are the few things he grabbed from the cave. He had shoved some seeds and food into a sac; hiked up the strap on his shoulder and left it all behind. He left his drawing, only to be stumbled upon again by someone else who was in search of a place to stay. He exits the cave and is immediately hit in the face with a gust of wind.

Now that Beau was gone, and that thought sent a pain sharper than a knife through his chest, he could glide through the trees instead of walk. He ignores the piercing sting in his heart as he started to climb the tree.

He isn’t careful as he climbs the tree. He aims for speed, not caring enough if the bark scrapes at his skin. He reaches for the next branch, and the next, and the next. He ignores the calluses on his hands and the blood flowing from his palms. He finally reaches a tall enough branch, and he jumps.

For a second, he thinks he’s not going to catch himself.

He starts to glide through the air, his fall slowing and elongating. He aims for a branch on the next tree, then another, and another.

He goes as hard and as fast. The sun has long set but Tommy doesn’t stop. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he wasn’t stopping. He didn’t need to stop. He would when his body collapsed and his muscles ached so much he wondered if they were being torn apart cell by cell.

He listens to the leaves shuffle, moonlight peaking through the leaves and hitting his face. He was getting close to a village, he could hear families laughing and see light shining through the edge of the forest. He would have thought nothing of it, he should have let it go. But, with the recent loss of the most important person in his life, he was lonely, and perhaps living vicariously through normal villagers would help him heal.

He slows and turns towards the yellow light, he hesitates for only a second. He turns his attention towards going toward the light. He reaches the edge of the forest, remaining hidden by the trees. He stalks around the trunks, climbing slower to be closer to the people.

He’s only a few feet off the ground now and he can see the town clearly. The villagers were dancing around in the town square. They were laughing and spinning around, the sound of their chatter filled up his ears. Tommy lets a ghost of a smile grace his face, it was hard to think that people that were so happy could hate him so much. It was hard to imagine these people, laughing and joking, would call the HRA the moment they knew of his presence.

“What are you doing, sir?” Tommy hears a voice call to him.

Tommy jumps, looking around to see if anyone was talking to him. He wasn’t wearing his disguise, his bright red feathers were out for the world to see. He shouldn’t have been so stupid, he shouldn’t have acted so impulsively.

“Sir?” They ask again.

Tommy looks down to find a little kid staring up at him, he can’t be more than 5 or 6. He briefly plays with the idea of running away and not looking back, but he knows that won’t end well. If he did the kid could tell his parents and they would call the HRA. If he could distract the kid long enough so he could convince him to not tell anyone they had met, he might be able to get away.

“Hello,” Tommy says. He jumps off the branch the last couple of feet to get down on the kid's level. Tommy waves to him and tries his best to send him a relaxed smile, he doesn’t know if it was convincing or not.

“What were you doing?” The kid asks, playing with the hem of his shirt.

Tommy was caught off guard. How was he supposed to answer that? “I was just watching the festival,” Tommy smiled.

“Do you want to join?” The kid asked. This took Tommy aback, did the kid not see his feathers? Did he not care? Did the village not care? Tommy wasn’t going to risk it, this kid might not even know what a hybrid is.

“No, it's okay, I can just watch,” Tommy says.

“Are you sure? You look lonely,” And ouch. That hurt. Tommy does his best to smile, but it feels more like a grimace. He laughs awkwardly and leans against the tree.

“It’s okay, you can go back to the village with your friends. I was just going anyway.”

“Are you sure,” the kid asks with such sincerity that Tommy’s heart melts just the slightest. Beau would have loved him.

“Yeah, it’s okay, you go have fun,” Tommy reassures.

“Okay!” The kid responds, then runs back into the village.

Tommy lets out a breath of relief. Just before the kid rounds the corner he turns around, looks at Tommy, and waves. Tommy waved back, giving one of the first genuine smiles before the kid disappears.

Tommy knows that he has to get out of there now, even though he feels safe that the kid won’t tell anyone immediately. He starts climbing up the tree again, quickly, the bleeding on his hands started again, but he kept going.

He can still see the light of the village when he realizes how sore his legs and his arms are. He was no longer running on the adrenaline from earlier that day. He practically collapses when he finally makes it up tall enough to glide. He makes his first jump and when he lands his knees nearly buckle underneath him.

His next jump, he couldn’t even catch himself.

He knew he was falling, he couldn’t lift his arms to glide down and slow everything. For a brief second, he thought he was going to die, he was going to hit the ground and die and no one would be there for him. No one would know how to give him a proper funeral if anyone even found his body. Time won’t slow, flowers won’t grow, he was going to die and he was going to be alone.

He didn’t know if he was screaming, he didn’t know if he was crying. He didn’t know what happened, he only remembered flailing his arms and the wind rushing past him. He just wanted to glide, he wanted to fly. The last thing he remembers is acceptance.

He was going to die, and he was okay with that.