Work Text:
Jay sat up in the crow's nest, leaning against the side of the small railing as she gazed out in the distance, her spyglass loosely held in the palm of her hand as she rolled the object around a few times. Even though she had the object readily available, she still chose to squint off at the distance, her eyes watering from the wind that threw itself against her face.
She spread her wings, enjoying the breeze that sifted through her small tawny-colored feathers. If she closed her eyes, she could even pretend that she was able to fly. Not that she was actually able to, with how small her wings were. But it was nice to pretend sometimes.
Prying her eyes back open, Jay stared at the open water below her, skipping over waves that curled and thrashed against the side of their ship. She continued to fidget with the spyglass, smoothing her fingers over the rim surrounding the eyehole.
With a sigh, Jay brought the object to her eye, staring through it at the horizon in case she should spot anything. At this point, she didn’t even know why she was up here, it’s not like they were on an active lookout for any land they might be nearing. As far as any maps told them, they were in the middle of the ocean where there should be no islands or land masses that wouldn’t be spotted from the top deck. There was no need to sit up in the crow's nest as she was doing.
But reluctant to admit it, Jay liked the feeling of being up high like this, the wind against her skin, and how it seemed so much cooler all the way up here. She figured that Gillion would enjoy the temperature up here, along with the wind that the Triton seemed very fond of. However, Gillion never usually went up into the crow's nest, he tried to avoid it when possible. Jay didn’t understand why, it was beautiful up here.
It was one of those places where one could just get away from the rest of the crew. Sure they had the storage room for whenever things got too bad, but the crow's nest was oddly freeing. At least that's what it felt like for Jay. She didn’t know if Chip shared that sentiment, but considering how much time he spent up here, it was probably a good guess that he did.
“Jay, got a minute?” Came a hoarse shout from the top deck. Jay peeked over the edge of the railing, spotting Drey looking up at her, squinting against the brightness of the sun. He shifted his weight back and forth, an eyebrow raising as he spotted her looking down.
“Oh, sure, one sec,” she called back, tucking the spyglass into her belt loop and beginning the slow descent down the ladder. The wind did its best to throw her in every which way but at this point, Jay was skilled enough to get up and down the rope ladder she could probably do it with her hands tied. Not to mention that her wings helped just a little bit when it came to balancing.
Drey was waiting for her at the bottom of the ladder when she got to the deck. Her hair was all over the place and she did her best to smooth the frizzy curls away from her face.
“What do you need?” Jay asked, standing up straight and plastering on a small smile. She brushed her hands over the front of her pants, putting up the most responsible front that she could, considering that she was a captain and she needed to act like it. Even if Drey’s first impression of her as a captain was pretty pathetic.
Drey gave her a tired smile, one that was full of fondness and amusement, “I got an itch in the wings if you could be so kind as to help.” He nodded over his shoulder, gesturing at the wings which had been wrapped carefully in bandages.
“Oh,” Jay blinked, suddenly surprised at the offer, “sure, yeah.”
Instinctively, Jay folded her own wings behind her politely, knowing that they hid easily behind her shoulders. That was the good thing about them being so small at least.
Drey began the short walk to the stairs and Jay quietly followed, her mind racing with thoughts. It had been so long since she had seen any of her family members in a good enough relationship to ever show her wings. Her meeting with her dad had gone horribly, but Jay felt that she would never show her wings to Jayson like that. Never.
Ava was gone and Jay hadn’t seen her mother in almost a year. Drey had been gone for longer.
There was an almost sense of nostalgia as Drey eased himself into one of the chairs they had in the small commons room with a grunt. His chest faced the back of the chair as he faced away from Jay, who grabbed one of the stools nearby.
Jay felt a twinge of anxiety bubble up from the pit of her chest. It had been so long since she had done something like this, especially with another member of her family. Sure, Chip or Gillion often helped preen her wings, but they didn’t understand the feeling. Chip and Gillion had no wings that Jay could preen back, nor did they have the same instincts that both served as a curse to Jay and a connection to her other crewmates.
For some reason, sitting here with Drey was making her nervous. But with a quick exhale, Jay shook the thoughts out of her head, scooting closer to carefully unwrap the bandages from around his wings.
The two of them were silent, a sense of awkwardness settling in the space between them. Jay chewed on the inside of her mouth, letting the bandages pool on the ground as she tugged them away from the damaged wings.
This wasn’t the first time she was seeing Drey’s wings after getting out of the B.L.O.C.K. She had been the one to suggest bandaging them after all, the same with the slings that held his arms. But even though she had seen them before, the sight didn’t get any easier to look at.
The previously sleek black and white feathers were mostly graying with stress and age. Chunks of feathers were torn out by the handful, exposing bloodied and scabbed skin that still bled when disturbed. The left wing had been broken years ago and healed wrong, which meant that Drey had a hard time moving it without pain. It hung limply, bending in all the wrong ways as the pressure from the bandages was suddenly removed.
Both of his wings had been clipped and even though the feathers were slowly growing back, his primaries were cut nearly to the skin, taking a few of his other feathers with. Some of the bald spots refused to grow feathers again, even with the time that he had been on the Albatross, there were no signs of budding feathers.
He couldn’t fly with them, even if all the feathers were grown back and they had rebroken his wing to try and set it properly. The muscles had been worn down from the years he had spent in prison meaning that he would probably never fly again. At least not without extensive work and practice, which he couldn’t manage with the constant fatigue that left him sleeping most of the day.
Jay had seen her fair share of injuries, she knew how bad wings could get with neglect. And she had a few bad habits of pulling at her feathers when she was stressed (one that Chip still scolded her for).
But the sight of Drey’s wings filled Jay’s heart with a sort of sadness. It was a type of sadness that could only be attributed to grief. Drey had been gone almost her entire life and he came back broken and beaten beyond repair. A part of her still mourned the loss of her uncle who she had given up believing he was still alive.
Drey coughed, suddenly bringing Jay out of her thoughts as he sluggishly moved his right wing to nudge her leg.
“Don’t be getting all squeamish on me,” he rasped, a joking tone lilting his voice, “I know you’ve seen worse.”
“Yeah,” Jay couldn’t help but chuckle weakly, placing her hand on the spot between where his wings protruded from his back, “it’s just been a while since I’ve done something like this.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten,” Drey huffed, “I don’t think I could stand asking Chip.”
“No, no, I haven’t forgotten,” Jay insisted, smoothing down the patches of feathers that remained on his back. Most of them had been scratched or burned off, leaving few sprouting feathers that were still trying to survive. They weren’t as soft as the downy feathers that she had on her back, they were actually pretty rough. All of his feathers had that sense of roughness to them, like a thin layer of dirt coated them.
“Chip’s pretty good at preening wings,” Jay insisted, licking her lips, “he likes doing it and I like letting him do it.”
“I can imagine he’s gotten good over the years,” Drey tilted his head to the side, another cough wracking his body, “I couldn’t handle his reaction to my wings. He’d get all sad and nervous and then he would be a complete wreck. You must know how he gets.”
“I do,” Jay smiled softly even though Drey couldn’t see her face. She started on the feathers that were closest to his back, tugging them into place as best she could with how many patches were missing.
“He used to love my wings, he’d ask to preen them all the time when he was younger,” Drey’s voice had a hint of fondness in the way that he spoke, but Jay could hear the sadness that laced the undertones.
“I loved your wings too,” Jay said, focusing her gaze on the feathers in front of her, fingers working with a long-ingrained instinct, pulling chunks of dirt and sand out from between his feathers. “We were the only ones in the family that had spotted wings.”
“Heh,” Drey huffed a small laugh, “we were.”
Another bout of silence settled between the two of them. Jay pressed her lips into a thin line, pulling broken feathers as gently as she could. But she didn’t miss the way that Drey flinched, coughing each time to try and mask it. A small frown tugged at the corners of her lips as she continued to work, focusing mostly on his right wing since it was the one he could stretch out the easiest.
She ran her fingers through a patch of graying feathers, a sadness welling up in the back of her throat. The spots that the two of them once shared were barely visible in Drey’s feathers anymore. The white dots were unique to only Drey and she had loved them because it was something they had in common. And Jay used to look up to her uncle, so of course, she would have looked for anything that she could relate to.
Well, now look how that ended up.
The tips of her fingers were stained slightly red from the dried blood that clung to his wings but Jay paid no mind to it. She was no stranger to blood, it didn’t bother her. She just focused on the task at hand, trying her hardest not to let her mind wander and ultimately failing at the task.
Drey had been gone almost her entire life, leaving with no warning one day and never returning. She had thought he had died. Long ago, Jay gave up hope that he was still out there somewhere. Jayson had treated his legacy like it was a disgrace, spitting on anything that might respect him or remember him fondly.
All the pictures in the house had been put away or thrown out—Jay never knew what had happened to all the family portraits after Ava died—any mark that Drey had put on the house had been dusted away and smoothed out. There had been a dent in the wall from a few too many play scuffles between Drey and his nieces. Those were patched quickly.
Toys and nicknacks that were gifts from the man were discarded and Jayson seemed to completely ignore the fact that he had a brother at one point. No one was allowed to talk of him, even in family reunions, Drey was never mentioned. It was as if he had never existed at all. A person that had been a constant in Jay’s life for the six years she had been alive had been completely wiped off the map of her world and Jay had no idea how to deal with it.
So she had done what everyone else in the family had done and ignored that he had ever existed, or had ever left in the first place. She didn’t resent him, no, not like her father did. But she just went along with what everyone else did and didn’t bother trying to ask questions.
Jay frowned, digging her teeth into her bottom lip. Here he was, the uncle that Jay had looked up to as a child, his wings underneath her hands once more. The feathers were old and everything about him changed. But for the first time in a while, Jay felt like she was just a little girl again with stunted wings that at the time were completely normal-sized.
“Jay—” Drey began, but Jay cut him off.
“Why did you leave?” Jay blurted out, her voice cracking in the middle as her hands suddenly stilled.
Drey froze, his shoulders tensing slightly as he rolled the question around for a few seconds. Jay was almost afraid of the answer.
What she didn’t expect was a soft, almost exhausted-sounding question thrown right back at her, “why did you leave?”
Now it was Jay’s turn to freeze, choking up so hard that she almost gasped on her next breath. She clenched her jaw so tightly she could practically hear her teeth grating together. Jay forced her hands to continue working on Drey’s damaged wings, doing what she could to salvage the wreck. It was something to keep her hands busy, and she figured that Drey had done this on purpose.
“I wanted to find out what happened to Ava,” Jay said in a small voice, knowing that every time she said it out loud, it sounded just as childish and stupid as it really was. She swallowed thickly, blinking away the tears that threatened to spill from her watery eyes.
“There was foul play involved, she… she shouldn’t have died… I needed to know what happened, to know who did it,” Jay continued when Drey didn’t seem like he was going to say anything, “I wanted to know what happened. And then Chip was there, and I was about to go visit my father for a few months and I was stressed and there was an opening right there . So I took it.”
“What were you going to do when you did find out what happened?” Drey asked after a moment of silence, “What were you going to do when you found out who killed her?”
“I…” Jay deflated, “I don’t know…”
Drey exhaled slowly, his entire body shuddering when Jay plucked a certain broken feather. He leaned his chest against the back of the chair with a bit more exhaustion in his position.
“Would you have gotten revenge?” Drey asked, “forgiven them? Let them go?”
“I don’t know anymore,” Jay slid her tongue over her lips, “I don’t know what I would’ve done.”
“If anything happened to Jayson, I think I would thank whoever did it,” Drey laughed so suddenly that it startled Jay out of the tears that were starting to fall. She sucked in a sharp breath as Drey deflated once more, his laughter descending into a sharp cough. “But you and Ava were close… I’m sorry about what happened… I wish I could’ve been there to support you… I don’t blame you for taking the opportunity to find out what happened.”
Jay brought her hand up to her face, wiping her eyes on her sleeve, “but it’s different now. I want to be here because I want to be here. I still want to know what happened to Ava, sure, but I like the adventures we’ve been going on as a crew.”
Drey hummed, and Jay kept going, “I care for them… I… I did before but I couldn’t let myself get too attached. And then I did the one thing I told myself not to,” she gave a watery laugh, “Chip is just too charming for his own good I guess, and I can’t say no to Gillion.”
“Chip’s grown up to be a fine captain,” Drey sighed, “I never thought he would be a captain of his own ship. And Finn, to think that he had children, grandchildren .” Drey chuckled again.
Jay smiled weakly with a small exhale, she smoothed the feathers down at the wrist of his wing, pressing her palm against the joint and applying a small amount of pressure. Not enough pressure to hurt, but enough that Drey would feel it.
“I never thought that I would’ve had that much of an influence on you that you’d follow right in my footsteps,” Drey insisted, “I thought I would have been a better influence.”
“It’s better than being back home, or part of the navy,” Jay pulled another feather, “with all the things they’re doing, how could I not have known?”
“It’s hard to see things like that when you’re already a part of it,” Drey reasoned, “People go along with it because either they have no idea what’s going on or they’re all too aware of what’s happening and think it’ll be best for their own interests.”
“You never did answer my question,” Jay said, “about why you left.”
“You never gave me a chance,” he teased and Jay felt a small bit of warmth spread throughout her chest. She stretched her wings out behind herself, ruffling her feathers before settling them back behind her back.
“I left because I didn’t want to be in the navy,” Drey finally responded after a few seconds of letting the joke hang in the air, “and in a Ferin family, there’s really not an option to not be in the navy. I didn’t want anything to do with the stuff that was going on there. I didn’t like how Jayson acted like he was so stuck up whenever he was in the navy garb like he wasn’t even my brother.”
Jay frowned, she knew all too well what her father was like under the navy persona. He wasn’t much better when he wasn’t in uniform, but it was worse when he was.
“We fought, your mom tried to intervene, it didn’t work. I didn’t want the life that the navy would bring, something about it struck me the wrong way,” Drey looked over his shoulder slightly, the bags under his eyes seeming so much darker in this lightning, “I guess I was right about that gut feeling.”
Jay looked away, dropping her hands to her lap now that she had finished with the right wing.
“I wanted a way out, and I was mad at Jayson and I thought, ‘you know what would be both a way out and a way to piss him off?’” Drey hesitated slightly, tilting his head to the side, “well, it wasn’t really like that… It was kind of like how it was for you… I saw the opportunity right there… and I took it.”
Jay frowned, “I guess we really aren’t that much different after all.”
“Guess not,” Drey chuckled and Jay found herself laughing softly as well. She brought her shoulders up to her ears, a sigh spilling from her lips.
The silence that surrounded them was almost palpable, Jay was suffocating underneath it all. But after a few minutes, Drey coughed sharply with a wheezing exhale.
“If you could do what you can with my other wing,” Drey nodded to the left, “I’d appreciate it. I can’t really spread it out very well but the spot near my back has been really bugging me.”
“Yeah,” Jay nodded, “of course.”
She went back to work on preening Drey’s wings, doing what she could and trying not to jostle it too badly. She knew that it hurt and the way it bent couldn’t be pleasant, so she did her best to be gentle.
A warm feeling spread over her, a sense of familiarity moving aside the uncomfortable tension between them. Jay smiled to herself, relishing in the ability to bond like this again and knowing that it had been a long time since Drey had done something like this as well.
Jay hadn’t even realized how much she had missed her uncle. She had just ignored the feelings when she was younger because that's what everyone else had done. She stopped asking when Uncle Drey was going to come to visit when her father had yelled at her for mentioning him in their house. Her mother had tried to explain the situation, but at the time, Jay hadn’t understood.
She understood now.
She understood the feeling all too well.